Screen Unknown Senders

Client Notes

Last week, I helped Diana cut her Comcast bill in half, transitioned Sally to an iPhone and a less expensive cellular plan with Visible, and enabled screening unknown senders in Messages for John. I also responded to several clients about the phishing emails they received, consistently encouraging them to identify elements that make the messages seem illegitimate.

Screen Unknown Senders

To filter unknown senders, effectively removing them from your inbox, go to Settings > Apps > Messages. Scroll Down to Unknown Senders and enable Screen Unknown Senders.

In addition to moving messages to a separate list, this will also prevent notifications about them.

Customize Notifications

You can also customize notifications for some types of messages from unknown senders. This may be helpful if you don’t want to miss an order update and also want to avoid political solicitations.

In the same settings area, tap Allow Notifications and choose the types to permit. When enabled, such messages will appear in the Messages list for 12 hours. If you haven’t deleted them by then, they’ll return to one of the filtered lists of unknown senders.

Unsubscribe or Mark as Spam

As of April 2025, the FCC requires that text message senders honor recipients’ requests to unsubscribe. When you receive a message from a legitimate entity, you can respond “stop,” “quit,” “end,” “revoke,” “opt out,” “cancel,” or “unsubscribe” (or substantially similar), and expect that the sender will stop marketing to you.

As of OS 26, it’s much easier to issue these stop requests or mark a message as spam. The experience may be a little inconsistent depending on your device and software version. However, you may find a button at the bottom of a conversation with which you can “Stop or Report Spam.” If you’ve already sent a stop request, the button should only offer the latter.

Or, you’ll sometimes find that these options are combined with the Delete action. That is, when you press Delete, there will be choices to Delete and Report Spam or Delete and Stop.

Marking a message as spam submits it to Apple and your carrier to process further. Like email, when you receive true spam, it’s important to treat it as such and not respond at all. The FCC encourages us to “Avoid the Temptation of Smishing Scams,” and neither click links nor respond “stop,” even when offered the opportunity.

I’ve found it’s not possible to send a stop request on more than one message at a time. However, when triaging your messages, you can now more easily unsubscribe with a couple clicks, swipes, or keypresses on messages in series. Plus, you can multi-select and mark messages as spam. Use the Delete command to get this option.

Mark Unknown Senders as Known

At will, you may mark any sender as known and have their messages and notifications return to your inbox. This does not require you to add the sender to your contacts.

At present, there is not a way to list senders you have marked as known but not added to your contacts. For now, your devices’ management of that database remains hidden.