NTT DoCoMo to tackle junk e-mail

Customers will soon be allowed to choose their own e-mail addresses, rather than being assigned addresses identical to their mobile phone numbers, to make it more difficult for third parties to discover them, the newspaper said.

The newspaper said the change was to be announced next week, Nobody at the company was available for comment at the weekend.

Many of NTT DoCoMo´s 23 million customers complain of receiving four or five items of junk e-mail a day, often in connection with adult services, the article said. Customers must pay a charge of two or three yen to receive each item of e-mail.

The proposed solution may in itself cause problems, the newspaper noted.

Use of e-mail addresses interchangeable with mobile phone numbers has been one of the system´s selling points.

In addition, the newspaper said the Ministry of Telecommunications wants NTT DoCoMo to introduce a system that would allow users to reject unwanted messages.