What About Spam?

You know how much you hate getting spams flogging stock tips and sex drugs in your email each morning. Imagine how much more you’ll hate it when they start showing up on your digital picture frame when you walk into your living room, kitchen, or office. That could easily happen if digital frame manufacturers and software developers don’t take a few important steps.

Some researchers and companies who track spam now estimate that over 85 billion spam emails are sent each day and that the amount of spam now surpasses the volume of legitimate email.

Without even knowing these statistics, a check of most any inbox tells you that spam is a big problem. And it’s one that can’t be allowed to take root in the digital frame market. After all, what’s less appealing than your living room wall featuring a photo of your kids followed by an ad for Viagra?

For manufacturers who allow users to email photos directly to frames, this is especially important. These companies need to take steps to lock their frames down against spam. This could include turning email blocking on by default, requiring set up of email rules at initial configuration, and highlighting the importance of these steps in set up documentation (eStarling has taken good steps here).

For those that employ RSS feeds, an eye will need to be kept on security more generally. Most likely, fighting RSS spam will be handled by the provider of the RSS feed, but frame makers should actively engage with the major feed providers to make sure that protocols continue to be secure and spam is blocked. On the user side, education about strong passwords needs to increase.

Spam is causing major problems for the Internet as a whole. Since these frames are connected to the Internet, it’s unlikely that frame spam will ever be eliminated entirely, it behooves wireless frame manufacturers to learn from these problems and do what they can to minimize them.

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