Somebody please stop the spam texts

adzm

Frustratingly they will send from new numbers each time, so just 'unsubscribing' from one will not really do anything. They will use websites/domains that don't respond to anything unless they have the path in the text message too. It's maddening. Here in Ohio I am getting nearly 100 a day recently. I would like to block unknown numbers, but I have kids and I certainly don't want to miss an emergency message.

bombcar

These and the loan calls are making the medium useless We're going to have to go to double-opt-in just to communicate.

esikich

I've had my phone number for 20 years and I get maybe one or two a month. Are you guys reading or responding to them? I just archive them when I see them. I don't know what I'm doing right, but it's just never been a problem for me and I'm not sure why. I'm not particularly careful about hiding my number and have the typical grocery store rewards cards and whatnot.

JohnMakin

If you reply STOP, you just let them know you read their text and it's a number that will respond with an actual person behind it. I would not reply to it. It's very unlikely to do anything but make the problem worse.

joshuat

Spam calls, at least in the US, are a much more frustrating thing for me right now

Apreche

Screen unknown senders. Any text that comes from a number that is not in your contacts will be stashed away in the unknown senders bin without any notification. Problem solved.

ericbarrett

I have replied STOP to many of these and it has reduced the flood, but I still get several a day. The bot's reply to "stop" is always some variant of: > You have successfully been unsubscribed. You will not receive any more messages from this number. "From this number" is clearly a legalese parsing of some law or regulation and the end result is that you cannot truly opt out. Infuriating.

comrade1234

Politicians are allowed to send spam texts, emails, phone calls. They exempted themselves from all of laws prohibiting it. Just block it.

BeetleB

I "solved" this for email years ago (as did many before me): https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl... Any communication channel that doesn't involve a whitelist (e.g. invite/approve) will have this problem. Email. Phones. Text messages. If you want to fix this, the protocol must ensure the recipient first agrees to communicate with you. Until they do, all messages to them will be automatically blocked. This solution works. Yes, there are always ways to get around it, but in practice, it cuts the nonsense by well over 90%.

carlgao

This was one of the reasons I switched from iPhone to Google Pixel. Getting less spam was one of my biggest hallelujah moments after switching. The Pixel has never (AFAICT) mistakenly marked a text as spam, although it has mistakenly declined a few legit phone calls. It's not perfect but I am a less angry person now.

markkat

I simply want a whitelist. If you aren’t on it, you cannot text or call me.

psadri

I had exactly the same thought around Apple’s “report spam”. I have marked hundreds of text messages as spam. There is enough training data in there for even a dumb classifier to filter some of this stuff out. But next day, there are half a dozen more, nearly identical spam msgs sitting unread in the inbox. I have also found that replying STOP = sign of life, your number is marked as “someone alive on the other end” and gets resold to 20 new lists.

dstoe

That's what I love the EU GDPR for. By law no one is allowed to use my number without explicit consent in the first place. And if someone spammed me, they have to tell where they got my data from and have to delete it upon request. Love it!

nilamo

The TCPA was supposed to stop all spam calls. But we just decided to never enforce it. Performative politics at work.

chaostheory

It’s extremely annoying, but political organizations and politicians are not subject to any spam or telemarketing laws. If I had known prior, I would have never made political contributions or used a real email for voting. The naivety of youth

knappe

I get spam texts almost daily. I too wish this would stop and I've tried most of the things the OP has as well. I see this as analogous to being inundated with spam email and we solved the problem for email with regulation[0] and we need to do the same for SMS. The bad news is that it is also likely to get much worse before it gets better[1]. [0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... [1] https://www.npr.org/2026/07/12/nx-s1-5867763/ai-artificial-i...

bob1029

I was thinking about the possibility of getting an international phone number and using it domestically. The spam is really out of control in my area.

gwbas1c

The problem is that SPAMing works for US politicians, so they include exceptions in various anti-spam legislation for political calls / texts, and survey calls / texts. The solution is to recognize that our legislators have a severe conflict of interest, and instead ban these via ballot initiatives. Of course the politicians will whine and complain, but once the voters speak, they will comply.

fg137

I don't know I should feel good or bad, but I have not received a single political campaign message over the past few election cycles. Never. Says something about the political climate of where I live.

z3ugma

I have set up a Siri Shortcut on my iPhone using the Shortcuts app. It relies on political campaign and super-PAC texts containing the key phrase "Stop2End" or "End2End" The shortcut runs on any incoming message First it checks to see if "Stop2End" is in the body of the message It checks to see if the sender is in my contacts If the sender is not in my contacts then it replies with "STOP" This opts me out of about 3-5 lists per day The other change I made was to sign up for the Do Not Call registry on the FCC website