I’m probably not alone in getting quite a few “spam” SMS messages on my phone. Lately they’ve all been about PPI mis-selling but in the past they’ve been about dodgy loans, accident claims etc etc

Unfortunately all these messages come from mobiles that have been bought to bulk-send SMS spam and aren’t registered or legislated for in any way. The only recourse that you might possibly have against these are to report the text to your mobile phone operator in the hope that they will block that number so that others aren’t inconvenienced.

You obviously need to include the sender’s number when forwarding the spam text to 7226 or (87226 if you’re on Vodafone). On my phone, the ‘forward’ function doesn’t do this automatically. So here’s my great app idea:

• You set up a “blacklist” of words that usually appear in spam texts (e.g.: “PPI”, “claim” etc)
• When your phone receives a text with one of the blacklisted words it automatically pops up a dialog which shows you the text and asks you if you’d like to report it as spam.
• The app edits the text to include the original sender’s number and automatically forwards it to your operator’s SMS spam reporting number.
• The app then deletes the text from your text inbox.

It doesn’t sound too hard does it? It might even result in these spam merchants getting their comeuppance. So why can’t I find an app that will do this? All the anti-spam apps I can find want to filter messages out of my inbox and become my messaging app. I don’t want that, I just want to report these sons of guns.

If I get a bit of free time this will be my first Android app (unless someone else makes it first).