Once you’ve downloaded and installed any one of the aforementioned SMS blocking apps, jump into the Settings to get rid of spam SMS from your message inbox. This is because iOS 11 now assumes that you are conversing with a known contact and it no longer requires to club their texts under the junk tab.
You can also try out Truecaller to get access to both phone and message filtering but the latter is still finicky.Īlso, it is important for you to understand that SMS filtering will stop working for a contact if you reply to them at least three times. They let some spam messages slip through the cracks and that’s exactly what we don’t want. In addition to these three apps, we also tried out a handful of other SMS blocking apps but none of them were up to the mark. Install: ( Free, one-time in-app purchase option) If you can shell out the decently high one-time payment, SMS Checker is also one of the better SMS spam detection apps. This means that all processing will then occur offline on the device, helping you maintain your privacy.
The Smart Filters currently operate online, sending SMS data to unknown servers, but the English filter is expected to be made available offline in an upcoming update. Till then, you can define customizable rules, a blacklist and whitelist, to include keywords or sender’s name and not receive notifications of the same. The developers are currently training the app to understand and filter messages in more languages in the near future. However, you’re required to make a one-time payment to activate automatic blocking. This smart filter is not restricted to only English conversations, but can also filter Turkish spam texts with ease. But, it also includes Smart Filters to automatically separate out junk messages.
SMS Checker is yet another machine learning-enabled SMS filtering app that is available for free if you’re again willing to add keywords manually.
Install: ( Free, in-app subscription plans start at $0.99/month)
You can choose to continue the current subscription or shift to another app, post the trial periods end. There is no free tier but you are given a seven-day free trial period to test the blocking capabilities of the app. SMS Shield is one of the best SMS spam filtering apps of the lot but requires you to shell out $3.99 for a yearly subscription. You just need to complete a $0.99 in-app purchase to filter messages based on the keywords in this crowdsourced list.
Neither the contact details nor the private messages are sent to an online server for processing.īut if you’re already feeling overwhelmed with the manual updation of the blacklist/whitelist with new keywords, you can download a crowdsourced keyword list for your location right away.
You also don’t need to worry about VeroSMS toying with the content or details of the SMS because all spam processing happens locally on the device. You can define a blacklist/whitelist using keywords and sender names (such as AT-AIRTEL) you want the app to filter or not, respectively. While it does filter messages on its own, you are the guiding light for the same because you have to define each keyword that VeroSMS should block from showing in the main messages tab. If you’re looking for a simple SMS filtering iOS app that sends incoming SMS into the junk folder, VeroSMS should be your first pick.