HOW TO FILTER SPAM AND UNKNOWN SENDERS IN MESSAGES
The average person receives an awful lot of spam and scam messages by phone, text, and email. Both Apple and internet service providers offer anti-spam tools for email (which have varying degrees of effectiveness), and cell carriers and third parties have also worked to provide ways to identify or block unwanted or illegal calls on your phone.
Texts, however, are still fairly open to abuse. One overlooked set of options, available on your iPhone and in some cases your iPad or Mac, comes with notification and filter settings that can at least let you avoid seeing any of the incoming garbage.
1. iOS 16: The message lists with filtering on
On an iPhone, you can go to Settings → Messages, scroll down to Message Filtering, and enable the option labeled Filter Unknown Senders. This puts people who send you iMessages or text messages and who don’t match an email address or phone number in your contacts list into a special Messages list.
You can’t enable this feature on an iPad or Mac, but you can make use of it there.
