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Internet phones prevent sleep - Japan swamped by "labelled spam"

According to Japan Internal Report, DoCoMo has admitted that a horrifying 98% of the instant messages it sends to cellphone owners, are spam. Government measures to control it, have actually aggravated it.

There is "a flood of junk mail, and single-ring-and-hang-up solicitation calls sweeping through Japan's cellular market," according to a story from Japan Internal Report. So bad has the problem become, that vibrating and ringing phones are keeping people awake at night; and DoCoMo has admitted that the problem is unbelievably, incredibly bad.

The situation has got worse, not better, following Government intervention. Apparently, as from February this year, the trade and industry ministry decided it would be compulsory for email advertisers to label their spam as advertising. But this, says JIR, meant that people who previously thought it was unacceptable to spam phone users, decided that it was OK, as long as it was labelled spam.

Of the 900 million messages that go through DoCoMo's servers each day, 880 million (98%) are spam, says JIR, quoting company sources.

"The problem is that, regardless of the source of the message, subscriber phones ring (or vibrate) every time mail arrives," says JIR. The result is a boom in anti-spam add-in services from cellular operators.

Full details from Japan Internal Report directly.