It turned out that I had received a Multimedia Content Message from 88039 and was charged £1.28 + VAT for the pleasure. I had not subscribed to these messages, nor had I sent one to the number.
I first phoned O2 customer services and was put through to a nice young girl on the phone who tried to help, but couldn’t even open my online bill from her workstation! She explained some things to me (that I already knew) and suggested that I’d possibly been voting in the X-Factor – I hadn’t. That’s not cool.

So after several more suggestions of where I may have incurred the charges, I didn’t seem to be getting through to her that I didn’t use these things. The best thing she could say was that I should text the word “STOP” to the number to stop it from happening again. She couldn’t grasp why I wasn’t happy about losing another wad of money to do so. After that, I was told that O2 could do nothing for me – not even give me a contact number or name of the company that sent it. According to her, I must have subscribed to it at some point and just don’t remember, so it’s my problem.
Deeply dissatisfied, I turned to a web search and found an extremely interesting blog entry from someone with a similar experience.? As it turns out, they had received up to 8 messages and was charged for them all. I tried calling the 0871 numbers posted by other blog users on the above page, but when I got through to the operator, they checked my number and said they hadn’t sent the message. I didn’t believe them and asked a few questions about who else could send messages from the 88039 shortcode. Apparently, they were the main message delivery outfit, but several others could do so. Great.

So nearly admitting defeat, I turned to submit a complaint with ICSTIS – the UK’s premium rate telephone services regulator. They have a eat little page that lets you “WHOIS” a number. Within seconds, I found that 88039 was actually run by a company called 2 Ergo Ltd. I also got their contact details:

Phone: 01706 221777

Address:
St Marys Chambers
Haslingdon Road
Rawtenstall
Lancashire
BB4 6QX

So I reached for my phone and called The Enemy on the number given, all ready to give them a piece of my mind. However, the phone was answered straight away by a woman who was actually very pleasant. I explained the problem and she said “Oh, I bet I know what company that was… let me just check your number…” and she searched the database for messages that had been sent to me. Bingo – one message, she gave me the cost and the date it was sent, and she then told me that they had received hundreds of complaints about these. The company actually sending the messages was called “767 Media” who have apparently gone AWOL – they had been using random number generation to send out thousands of messages that users were charged £1.50 a time to receive. 2 Ergo Ltd are simply delivery agents for companies like 767 Media, but because of this particular scam, 2 Ergo Ltd were providing the refunds themselves and were pursuing their costs via “other channels”. So within 2 minutes of a phonecall to “The Enemy” (who used a normal UK geographic number that is therefore cheap to phone btw), I was given an apology, a full explanation, and I was promised a cheque refund by the end of the week!

It’s sad that purveyors of rip-off mobile phone content have a better, more helpful helpline than a multinational company like O2. But I’m happy in the way it’s turned out so far (although if the cheque doesn’t arrive / bounces, you’ll be hearing more from me!) and I can offer this advice:

If you receive messages from, or are billed for content from 88039, telephone 2 Ergo Ltd on 01706 221777, and ask nicely for a refund.

So I’m not boasting about this in any way – in fact, I’m offering my regular users, viewers and readers an opportunity: How would you like a free email account? As discussed above, it has a full Gmail interface for webmail, pop/smtp access and (crucially) 2Gb storage – addresses will be anythingyouwant@e-ignite.co.uk (I’ll also help you set up free email encryption if you’d like)

Interested? Drop me an email.

There is, unfortunately, one minor drawback: I have to use the default theme. As much as I liked the look of the blog previously, I’m a firm believer in content over aesthetics. But I’ll never say never… I may find a new theme at some point!

However, I would still welcome comments on the articles discussed here, and if you would like anything added to the posts, please send me an email (details on the Contact page) and I will add it to the blog manually. Possibly in a few months when the spammers have forgotten about this little site, I could maybe re-open the comments. However, for now I’m sad to say that they are closed.

In summary, Mobility Email is a distribution of Mozilla Thunderbird that can be run without installation from a USB Flash Drive, iPod or hard disk for example. It has been authorised for release by the Mozilla Corporation.

Mobility Email allows you to transport your entire email inbox simply on a USB stick, allowing you to plug it into any computer with a USB port and an internet connection, and communicate easily by email.

One of Mobility Email’s key features is that it comes with support for both S/MIME and OpenPGP Signing and Encryption features built-in, allowing users to digitally sign and encrypt their emails wherever they are. It includes a new, cutting-edge CVS version of GnuPG allowing users to utilise the new, more secure DSA2 and SHA224 technologies not yet available in any other standard release email client. Mobility Email truly is a plug-and-go solution, requiring no lengthy set-up procedure. Simply give Mobility Email your email account details, and you are ready to communicate securely using an excellent, portable email solution. Mobility Email removes the single most significant obstacle to the use of encryption: complexity.

It also includes several other advanced security features including the ability to “lock” and “unlock” your mail profile – this encrypts all your emails when you are not using them, meanin that ig you lose your USB Flash Disk for example, your emails are all safely encrypted and therefore can’t be read by anyone who may have found or stolen your disk.
Crucially, Mobility Email is fully compatible with Mozilla Thunderbird (1.5) extensions and themes since it is built on Thunderbird 1.5.x code. It comes with its own theme (that you can disable if you don’t like it) and several of the best extensions pre-installed. These extensions include Enigmail, Contacts Sidebar and Webmail. The Webmail extension allows users of web-based email services (such as Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Lycos email, Mail.com etc) to access their email from a mail client, meaning that you don’t have to spend hours going from website to website, entering different usernames and passwords – Mobility Email does it all for you, and you don’t have to pay for the webmail companiy’s POP service either! Mobility Email does it for you for free, and it’s even compatible with Gmail accounts. By integrating webmail accounts to Mobility Email, it allows users to use S/MIME or OpenPGP signing and encryption features with their existing accounts – this was previously not possible without specific software and an in-depth knowledge of GnuPG. Mobility Email removes yet another boundary!

Mobility Email is also available with an optional subscription to Mobilityemail.net – this provides users with their own @mobilityemail.net email address, provides a mailbox with at least 250Mb storage, and has full POP / SMTP / IMAP / Webmail access. It also protects you from spam and email viruses.

The Mobilityemail.net service starts at just $24.95 for a year’s service, but it is not necessary to sign up to this to get the Mobility Email software. Mobility Email is Open Source and will always be free.

Full details and free downloads are available at http://www.mobilityemail.net

The basics of the story are that the EU need to raise funds and in order to do so, they are looking at charging $0.015 per SMS message and $0.000001 for each email you send. So far it’s not clear whether the users will have to pay this (less likely IMO) or the service providers. But this will increase either the charges the user has to pay, or increase the advertising required on a free email page. It’s annoying to say the least.

However, the main concern is, yet again, privacy.

In order to prove that you’ve sent an email and therefore to charge you, a copy of the email (or at least some fairly detailed logging) will be required and this will have to be kept somewhere. This is a billing system, and therefore would be potentially easier to access than the EU’s logs of all email and net traffic. Does this mean that the information is available to more people? Can law enforcement or other agencies access the information without a correct court order? This is a real concern.

Personally, I have been more and more shocked recently by the EU’s newest laws that basically eliminate your privacy. However, a lot of this stems from the UK’s presidency of the EU. For example, did you know that it was the UK Government (namely Tony Blair) that pushed through this law requiring all European ISPs to keep all email and net traffic data for a period of up to two years? And again, their reasoning for it was the prevention of terrorism (see my frank opinion about this argument in this article). It is becoming more and more difficult for you to protect your privacy with regard to electronic forms of communication, and I am genuinely concerned that this taxation plan may be more than just a revenue increasing venture. In the EU, we already have to pay VAT on phone calls, SMS text messages and our Internet Connection charges, so why should the EU introduce yet another tax? Is it a revenue generation, or is it something more sinister? Yet another effort to track what everyone does on the web?

Perhaps the single most frightening question to ask yourself is this: Is there actually anything you could do about it if it is?

The plans for this section are really for me to update you all with any news stories that I think may be of interest – you may notice that these are generally all geeky and security/privacy related.? However, I’ll hopefully be able to make this a slightly more diverse area of the site, so look out for all the “personal” stuff too!

You never know, I might even be able to keep in touch more easily when I’m travelling the world and working abroad.