VoIP-Forum

It\’s time to face a coming plague, SIP spamming. This document is a good start for a much-needed discussion! Read it.

Spam, defined as the transmission of bulk unsolicited messages, has plagued Internet email. Unfortunately, spam is not limited to email. It can affect any system that enables user to user communications. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) defines a system for user to user multimedia communications. Therefore, it is susceptible to spam, just as email is. In this document, we analyze the problem of spam in SIP. We first identify the ways in which the problem is the same and the ways in which it is different from email. We then examine the various possible solutions that have been discussed for email and consider their applicability to SIP.

It is important that the SIP community react now, rather than later,
and define and deploy anti-spam measures before the problem arises.

• The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Spam, J. Rosenberg et al, October 2004

Chris Holland explains why dialling by SIP address is the future. I completely agree! Numbers will be connectors to the old-fashioned PSTN, not what we want to use to contact our friends and co-workers.

…who actually keys-in numbers to call somebody on their mobile phone? Once human interface issues have been addressed, we should never have to limit ourselves to numbers to \”call\” someone: A full SIP address ought to be a perfectly viable alternative and, in most cases, completely transparent to the user.

…and a comment from Robert Sanders:

I\’ll just stick with my SIP URIs for the moment. They\’re simple, globally unique, and almost 100% guaranteed never to receive any calls. That\’s everything I want from a telephone number.

• Chris Holland: The Blog.: VoIP: Numbers are so 1849
• The VoIP Blog: The Number of the Beast, Robert Sanders