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Apple needs to give a “reject texts from senders not in our phonebook”

Jackbequickly

Jackbequickly

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 6, 2022
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The filtering does not do it for me. Getting 20-25 political texts a day. So many it gets in the way of my company who’s customers do a lot of their ordering via text. Apple needs to give us a way of turning these off unless they are in my phone book!🤬🤬🤬🤬
 
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Jackbequickly said:
The filtering does not do it for me. Getting 20-25 political texts a day. So many it gets in the way of my company who’s customers do a lot of their ordering via text. Apple needs to give us a way of turning these off unless they are in my phone book!🤬🤬🤬🤬
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At least they'll be ending in a few weeks when the election is over.
 
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Jackbequickly said:
Apple needs to give us a way of turning these off unless they are in my phone book!
Click to expand...

It's called "Filter Unknown Senders". ;)

Per thread title of "reject" is not workable imo as what happens when an order comes in and number not in Contacts? Or some other legit text? And probably don't want to do simple block of area code as that will probably reject legit texts as well.

I get it. Would be nice to have something like mail filters for texts and Messages to have a concept of folders, that way can filter obvious spam (eg. "if message contains politician name[1|2]...") by deleting it or moving to some folder. Shortcuts Automations has a "stub" for this but can't do anything useful. Eg. no delete message Action, and since no folders, no moving of the message. (I do use this to send me a notification when my pharmacy uses a new number to send "prescription ready" messages and the message filters to the unknowns list).

In the meantime, there are apps that will filter spam messages. Some of the celco call blockers apps have it builtin, just need to agree to having the message sent to their servers to process. But get that people might not want that either, want processing to be done locally.
 
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HouseLannister said:
Thank you for that. I hate how Apple doesn't put all the settings for an app in the app itself. You got to check four places to find anything nowadays.
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Did this work of do you still get notifications from unknown sender texts. I do . . . .
 
Annoyingly, regardless of what filtering you have enabled on the iPhone, if you're forwarding texts to your Mac you'll get all the texts there, and there's no way to filter those. You can change the view to just be known senders but you'll still get the notifications you wouldn't get on the iPhone.
 
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How hard would it be for Apple to let us reject texts to senders not in our contacts? Easy peasy!
 
Jackbequickly said:
How hard would it be for Apple to let us reject texts to senders not in our contacts? Easy peasy!
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Well, most of those junk texts aren't iMessage and Apple is not your phone carrier, so any rejection would just be a cosmetic thing. The texts would still have to be delivered by your carrier before your OS could do anything about them. You say that's easy, but I feel any added complexity would stop text notifications from being instantaneous, and people would complain about any lag introduced. And we already have a working way to cosmetically filter these messages out and silence the notifications, so why reinvent the wheel? I get that you don't like their implementation, but it works great for a lot of people. If you can mockup something better, submit the feedback to Apple and they might incorporate some ideas into a future version of iOS.
 
HouseLannister said:
Well, most of those junk texts aren't iMessage and Apple is not your phone carrier, so any rejection would just be a cosmetic thing. The texts would still have to be delivered by your carrier before your OS could do anything about them. You say that's easy, but I feel any added complexity would stop text notifications from being instantaneous, and people would complain about any lag introduced. And we already have a working way to cosmetically filter these messages out and silence the notifications, so why reinvent the wheel? I get that you don't like their implementation, but it works great for a lot of people. If you can mockup something better, submit the feedback to Apple and they might incorporate some ideas into a future version of iOS.
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I call that BS. If the contact is not in my phone, the text should be rejected with no notification. Period.
 
Jackbequickly said:
The filtering does not do it for me. Getting 20-25 political texts a day. So many it gets in the way of my company who’s customers do a lot of their ordering via text. Apple needs to give us a way of turning these off unless they are in my phone book!🤬🤬🤬🤬
Click to expand...
Reply to the text with your favorite Bible passage.. three separate replies like that each 30 seconds apart. That’s what I did and somehow I don’t seem to get any spam texts anymore.
 
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I don't know whether or not "Filter Unknown Senders" notifies me when such a message arrives, because I'm not able to use that feature (I sometimes get legitimate texts from unknown senders, and I do want to be notified about them).

However, one thing that has absolutely saved my sanity this election season is a free app called Bouncer. It filters messages based off of a simple list of words that you create. Start off with words that you absolutely know are going to be political junk texts (kamala, trump, winred, actblue, etc.), and also glance through recent texts to see if there are any other examples of low-hanging fruit. That alone will snag most of them. A few more will trickle through, and as that happens you can then pick out words in those to filter as well. At this point, maybe one slips past the filters for me about once every couple of weeks.

Filtered messages go into a Junk folder, and once or twice a week I'll go in there, scan through it quickly to make sure there were no false positives (so far there have been none), and purge the junk. That, to me, is MUCH more tolerable than having my concentration interrupted constantly by these messages coming in.

Funny how politicians exempted themselves from junk text regulations.
 
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Thanks for the tip @macphoto861. Giving it a whirl. Nice price and better than nothing.

Like that it does everything locally vs server side like many other apps.
 
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It seems as if Filter Unknown Senders functions similarly to Silence Unknown Callers in the phone app. I have that enabled 99% of the time unless I’m expecting a call to come in during a period of time. Of course that does expose me to the phone ringing for a spam or other unwanted call during that time. But if I forgot to turn “Silence” off, I would not want the call blocked as the caller can leave a voicemail which I would see afterward.

Seems Filter Unknown doesn’t trigger a notification and puts those texts under a separate tab that doesn’t clog your view for texts that you want to see. With all the political texts coming in now, not getting a notification would ease that annoyance considerably. I can’t speak for others but that’s pretty much the way I’d want those features to work.
 
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macphoto861 said:
free app called Bouncer
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After a week of using this, nice app overall. Works as advertised.

Does not buy me much as I don't get many texts and these spam text were being filtered anyway via silencing unknowns, so is/was not as big a nuisance for me.

One thing that is a minor nit about the app is that if I delete the filtered text on my phone, it will not delete on Mac. Like I said, minor. Will probably keep the app installed and enabled as political texts will die out (already happening as the county's database has my ballot being marked as voted, so PACs are not spending money trying to chase my vote) but the "approve your loan" and ilk spam will keep trickling in (result of Authy being hacked/leaked earlier in the year; had been quiet but had an uptick in last week).
 
NoBoMac said:
One thing that is a minor nit about the app is that if I delete the filtered text on my phone, it will not delete on Mac.
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Ah yes, that is indeed annoying, though I believe it's an iOS limitation, not one of the app... apparently text message forwarding forwards messages before they reach the stage of being filtered. If Apple would give the option of filtering before forwarding, that would be taken care of.

But, as it stands now, I went ahead and turned off text message forwarding, which I was a little sad about, but worth it to save my sanity.

I think aside from political messages (which should be subsiding now, for at least a year or so), the only other junk texts I receive regularly are for self-employed health insurance options, easy to filter out.
 
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