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