AT&T has a whitelist feature. It's $4.99 per month per subscriber and can allow up to 30 approved numbers to send SMS messages to your phone.

Careful what you wish for. It might end up being implemented as an expensive and useless marketing ploy.

Expensive, yeah. It should be free, actually; my whole gripe is that I don't want to pay to receive messages I didn't even want. It doesn't help if I have to pay not to receive them.

But it does sound useful. And if it gets mindshare, competition could make it cheaper or free.

> Great info, but given that carriers are paid for every message I receive, I doubt their commitment to fighting text spam.

As more people get mobile e-mail, things like iMessage, etc., they're going to have to keep SMS from being overly spammy or people will stop using it.

It would be nice if phones had an option to treat text messages differently if the number isn't in your phone book. I wouldn't care about text message spam so much if it went to a spam folder and didn't alert like a regular text message.

I think you just described how Facebook handles email...

But I agree with you for the most part a distinction between known senders and unknown senders would be great. The only exception to this that I can think of personally, is for things like the Google 2-factor auth messages which appear to be sent from random numbers (in addition to being random numbers!).

There are actually various SMS Spamfilter and general SMS filtering/alerting apps in the Android Market.