While it’s relatively easy to stop spam calls on iPhone, Apple hasn’t yet provided a consistent way to mark unwanted incoming text messages and block and delete them. Nor do they identify texts for patterns–as the Mail app and iCloud.com does to mark commercial and fraudulent emails–to see if they look like something that should go right into the bit bucket. Here are a few things you can do to block annoying texts on your iPhone.
Option 1: Delete and Report
In some cases, iOS may display an option that says Report Junk or Delete and Report Junk for SMS messages from unknown senders. This depends on whether your wireless carrier supports the option and other configurations choices you’ve made for the Phone app and texting. If it’s available, you can swipe left in the conversation list on an unwanted message, tap the Trash icon, and tap Delete and Report Junk. In a conversation, a Report Junk option appears below the most recent text: tap it and then tap Delete and Report Junk.
Option 2: Use SMS filters
Apple already filters your Messages into All Messages, Known Senders and Unknown Senders, which helps hide away some of the messages you don’t want cluttering up your Messages app. However, if you want to stop those messages even getting into your Unknown Senders folder there are options.
You can install third-party SMS filters, an option Apple started supporting in 2017. Your messages are routed via these third-party filters. You do need to trust those third parties with your personal information as these filters do see the contents of your SMS messages. It is a privacy risk, but one that the companies involved have detailed policy statements about and bear the liability for if your messages were to be breached.
I wrote about how to use these filters in 2017, and the process remains identical today (though in iOS 18, the configuration is handled at Settings > Apps > Messages > Unknown & Spam). Once enabled it creates two tabs in Messages: one for Contacts & SMS the other for Unknown & Spam.
Apple lets you work with third-party apps that can examine your SMS messages for junk. Tagged messages are sorted into a filtered category.
Foundry
To find apps that offer SMS filtering, go to the iOS App Store and search on “SMS filter.” The App Store doesn’t have a category specifically for this task.
One option is TM Check, a scam and spam blocker from Trend Micro, maker of antivirus software. A month’s subscription is $1.99/£1.99, or you can subscribe for a year for $19.99/£19.99.
Due to the end-to-end encryption and privacy intent by Apple for iMessage, Apple doesn’t offer third-party filtering for that category of message. However, because all iMessage posts require validated Apple ID accounts, you can reliably block the source of an iMessage—they can’t just generate endless iMessage accounts, unlike the potential of creating false originating phone numbers for text messages.
Option 3: Develop a manual reflex
I’ve developed a quick set of actions for blocking unwanted texts that I wish I could make into a Shortcut in iOS, but which appears to require too many elements that aren’t available in Shortcuts.
When I receive an illegitimate text, or one from a real source that I didn’t give permission to text me, here’s what I do:
- Tap the conversation to view the message.
- Tap the profile link at the top.
- Tap the Info button.
- Tap Block Caller.
- Tap the back button in the upper-left corner (<).
- Tap Hide Alerts.
- Tap the back button again to get to the top level of Messages.
- Swipe left on the conversation and tap the Delete Conversation trash can icon.
What this does is:
- Blocks further calls or texts, which has become more reliable since the FCC tightened rules about validating phone numbers in Caller ID a couple of years.
- Prevents notifications if that block is somehow eluded.
- Deletes the conversation from your field of view, reducing clutter in Messages.
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Author: Glenn Fleishman, Contributor, Macworld
Glenn Fleishman’s most recent books include Take Control of iOS and iPadOS Privacy and Security, Take Control of Calendar and Reminders, and Take Control of Securing Your Mac. In his spare time, he writes about printing and type history. He’s a senior contributor to Macworld, where he writes Mac 911.