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No one with an iPhone is eager to deal with what can feel like a constant stream of spam messages. They take up your time, take up storage space, and (depending on the kind of spam you receive) can cause needless stress in your life. Luckily, there are ways around spam — you just need to know which settings to enable. Experts agree: this is the best way to protect your iPhone from spam.
Enable Spam Blocking Features
Did you know Apple has already thought of nearly everything — including how to prevent spam from getting through to you on your iPhone? There is a spam blocking feature that you actually enable that will reduce or completely banish the amount of spam you get.
“This application offers a unique spam blocking feature that uses a specially crafted list compiled by Google themselves, to use this feature on your phone, click the options button, which would direct you to the Caller ID & Spam settings,” says Olivia Tan, the co-founder of CocoFax. “Here you can activate the Filter Spam Calls option that will block all of the callers recognized as spammers in Google’s database.”
A second thing to consider, according to Tan, if you don’t want a different alternative to stop spam, is to remember that you live in a world of third-party applications. “So, stopping unwanted calls using third-party applications will help protect your iPhone from spam,” Tan says.
“Finally, If you have some identified spam, you can use the reported spam or blocking feature for any contact on your phone,” Tan says. “To apply this setting on any contact, just go to the contact settings and push the report spam/block button.”
Steven Emerson, technical expert of Mobile Biponi, shares two more nuggets of wisdom on how to effectively prevent spam:
** Filter Messages From Unknown Numbers. “This setting will let you clock the messages, which are most possibly spam, from unknown numbers,” Emerson says. “To activate this, go to SETTINGS >> MESSAGES, then toggle on FILTER UNKNOWN SENDER. This will have your messages displayed in two columns, the ones you know and the ones you don't. You can also tag the unknown number as blocked or spam.”
** Block Calls from Unknown Numbers. “This is to protect you from unknown callers,” Emerson says. “Go to SETTINGS >> PHONE, then toggle on CALL BLOCKING AND IDENTIFICATION. You can add specific numbers here or just all the unknown numbers.”