Tech Friday: A better way to filter and clean up iOS messages

Posted By on December 30, 2022

Prior to 2022, I managed phone numbers and contacts on my iPhone poorly – perhaps “the wrong way.” Every year I created a new A/SPAM list of callers WrongWaySignand emailers and self-managed these lists. Of course this didn’t stop callers or text messages from new unknown phone numbers. So I tried a couple of different blocking apps for the iPhone with questionable results. Eventually I did settle on using TruecallerBUT it wasn’t and isn’t foolproof … nor did it really do the job all that well … especially when it came to managing all those new and old messages.

This past year I finally discovered a simpler and better way to manage as well as clean my contacts and pile of texts that were unwanted and part of the SPAM test message iMessageFiltersproblem … and you might want to make it part of your 2023 New Year’s resolution? Thankfully it is pretty simple and included in the iPhone’s Message app settings – yet it isn’t often known by Apple iOS users.

    1. Go to Settings, then Message, then Unknown and Spam
    2. Toggle on “Unknown Senders”
    3. In my case, check the Truecaller app (not a necessary app or step)
    4. Disable notifications from unknown
    5. Go back to Messages app and touch “Filters” (arrow above)
    6. To clean up,then  select “Unknown Senders” (Junk, Promo, etc) and touch 3-dot menu/Select Message, then “All” and “Delete”
    7. From this point forward, use only view Known Senders and then occasionally toggle to Unknown for for the 2-factor codes, etc AND to clean up your unwanted text messages in bulk

iMessagesList

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