Somebody please stop the spam texts
notes.npilk.com
notes.npilk.com
For example, for DoorDash, I should just receive order status notifications but they ping me every few days to try out a local restaurant. They want to remind me that their app exists on my phone and I can spend money with them.
Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.
It makes me realize that email is a much better system for this. You have an entire archive of every email you receive, with the ability to search, filter, forward, and even set up custom rules to delete items containing certain text, for example.
Yes it's a hassle to manage an email inbox, but this kind of flexibility gives users a lot of power that phone, sms, or native notifications lack.
Even if they _do_ offer that sort of granularity, these apps introduce a new 'category' of notification everyday, and the new category is always opt-out, so there will always be a small stream of notifications leaking through.
If you send me one spam sms or notification you go immediately on the list.
Works fine except the notification identifier is different for ipad and phone so I have to add those apps twice.
It unfreezes doordash (or any app) when you explicitly open it, and freezes it again after you don't use the app for an hour.
You can't get spam notifications if the app isn't even allowed to run.
iOS has gotten reasonably good about tracking packages in wallet outside of any other app, but then again, wallet has sent advertisements about other Apple things.
1) they will give you a recurring pop up banner when you open the app to turn on all notifications, making it sound like it’s just for delivery notifications, even if you already have those turned on. You have to ignore it.
2) at least once recently, they just toggled them all on, on my behalf, anyway. I found out after receiving a random marketing notification. Then I turned them back off & it hasn’t happened since.
3) there have been occasions where even with granular controls, I don’t receive the delivery notifications if I have the marketing ones turned off. Hasn’t happened in a while, but now I always keep that in mind that it’s a possibility.
What has worked for me:
- For humans pitching a politician / political party: threats that would hurt their cause.
After receiving non-stop phone calls from my local political party's office - and repeatedly telling them to stop calling me - I resorted to "the only people I hate more than {the other political party} are spammers. If you call me one more time I will vote for {the other political party}". I never received another call.
After the last election cycle I was left with a bloody battlefield of torn vote-for-me signs that I didn't consent to being outside my house. Recently I've had three local politicians knock on my door and ask to put their signs up. My response was "if you put a sign outside my house I will put up my own sign that reads "don't vote for anyone who has a sign outside my house". No signs so far.
- For spam calls on the iPhone: Settings -> Apps -> Phone -> Screen Unknown Callers -> Ask Reason for Calling. No spammer will bother, at least in my experience.
- For spam texts on the iPhone: Settings -> Apps -> Messages -> Unknown Senders -> Screen Unknown Senders.
Yes, it takes discipline early on. That "1" new Unknown Senders message notification on your Messages app is just screaming at you to pay attention to it. Don't go there - it's just more spam. If it's not then they'll call you and go through your reason-for-calling filter.
There's no "Unsubscribe and report as spam", just "unsubscribe" and "report spam".
If it's a regular email that you vindicatively want to classify as spam, do that and don't unsubscribe. It will go directly to your spam folder in the future, and it will hurt a tiny bit their standing with Google.
Someone managed to connect my phone number to my voter registration during my recent move, so the spam is back. This time, I am replying END or STOP and then blocking the number & reporting spam, just in case that creates more friction for them.
I think it's also helpful to be prompt if you'd like to help others; A campaign will use e.g. twilio numbers leased for a matter of hour, then release it. If you wait too long to report spam, you damage the number's reputation without actually punishing the hyperactive spammer.
Since there's no way to tell PAC texts from actual candidate-funded texts, and the PACs seem to now be the vast majority, I always hit the checkbox to block and report as SPAM to my telco. Not that it'll help much but if it's an actual candidate, the telcos whitelist them anyway (because of course politicians passed a law that requires them to), and if it's a PAC maybe it'll burn their SIM farm number pool a little faster, costing them more.
If you're on Android, I highly recommend: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. The UX is a little obtuse to set up the first time (ask your LLM) but once set up it works great.
This is why every campaign is a new legal entity each time around.
It's not just offshore call center con artists preying on the elderly. There's a huge, highly profitable, legal-but-scummy onshore industry too. It was obvious that 'nice Reverend on TV' sold her out to anyone who'd pay - and then they sold it and so on... Even though I'm an atheist, these assholes make me wish there was actually a hell full of fire and brimstone awaiting them.
Sadly, each time they use a different number, so my list of blocked numbers is huge and getting more massive by the day. Sooner or later, I will have blocked every possible phone number in existence.
Last time I checked NoMo nor anything else has that level of granularity. All the other spam blocker tools prioritize "one-click simple" which means all their scoring is generic and opaque. At most they let users add binary black and whitelist terms. I haven't seen any that let users weight their own terms.
For me, the only calls that ring through are the ones coming from people who are already in my list of known contacts. Everyone else gets filtered through NoMoRobo Max. And all spam callers so far haven’t bothered to try to get through to me. They just hung up.
Likewise, the only text messages that get directly through to me are from people already in my list of known contacts. Anything from any unknown number gets filed separately, and I have to periodically go check to see who or what has sent me which messages I haven’t seen.
So far, I haven’t had anyone text or call me that was legitimate, who wasn’t able to get through one of those filters. I might have had to call them back after seeing their text message or hearing their voicemail, but that’s as far as it has gone.
I am not yet dissatisfied enough with NoMoRobo Max that I would be looking for alternatives. But that said, I’m glad to know of a good alternative that I can try if/when that happens.
they do at least enough sentiment analysis so that "fuck off" behaves like "stop" and they respond that they're removing you from their list and won't contact you again.
The minute I unpublished my phone number from job recruiting sites, my spam calls declined by 60-70%. Apparently these career sites don't make enough money of job connections alone.
I now just ask for an email as a first point of contact from potential recruiters.
You're thinking about e-mail unsubscribe links.
It's my understanding that, in the United States anyway, if you reply STOP, the phone number is blocked at the carrier level.
This is the buried lede.
Of course, it only applies to that phone number, so they can still spam you from another number in their rotation.
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.
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
It checks to see if the sender is in my contacts
There's a chance someone in your contacts would send you a message with "Stop2End" in it? You must have curious friends.
I am going to attempt to wire something up with Tasker because it is getting too bad to cope with.
Previously it had been interpreted as: "the Congressional intent of the TCPA was "to ban dialing from a database"". In contrast to the new ruling: "Sotomayor wrote that "Congress’ chosen definition of an autodialer requires that the equipment in question must use a random or sequential number generator."
Congress is going to get right on that though: "Senator Ed Markey, one of the authors of the TCPA ... announced the same day of the decision [2021] that they would be looking to introduce amended legislation to address the Court's decision."
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.
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.
At least the phone calls are handled properly...
We're going to have to go to double-opt-in just to communicate.
My landline does not ring.
Stopped using email almost a decade ago.
If anybody needs to get in touch with me, they physically have to show up (or write a letter).
----
This is seemingly "impossible" for most people to attempt, but is worthwhile. May I encourage anybody reading this to step away from phones/emails for just 24 hours, to start.
I used to have an auto-expanding snippet that would insert the entire wikipedia entry for the Tiananmen Square massacre and then I'd never hear back from them. This was mostly when the Chinese bots were doing the pig butchering scam.
If you're going to donate to a political party or politician, do it anonymously.
Maybe tell them you're a Netherlands citizen.
Who was responsible?
Then there's a business name, that ostensibly offers homeowner services in my metro area. And asks if I'm interested in a quote.
So the only actually correctly-targeted aspect is the service area, although when I look up the businesses, sometimes they are HQ'd out-of-state. I'm not a woman with this name, and obviously these people don't actually work for the company they're claiming. And, I'm not a homeowner anyway. I can't use any of their painting services!
Awhile ago, I looked up each of the involved businesses, and I emailed them on their official web contact form, just an "FYI, someone is using your name in vain..." but none of them have acknowledged this.
But it's always from a different number. And it just trickles in, every few weeks there's one. And I can't tell them STOP or block them. I just stare as a new one pops up, and I wonder, what's the scam behind this?
Performative politics at work.
I'd miss all kinds of texts from my doctors which seem to come from all kinds of different numbers forcing me to browse the bin anyway.
The only slight neg is all that flexibility can make first-time set up a bit tricky, just LLM it.
[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...
Email is tolerable because gmail and others implemented software spam filters. Gmail did so because they were in competition with other email providers and it was a way to get users. The incumbent phone carriers have no incentive to compete here.
Other platforms did better solving the spam problem, so most people simply don't use SMS/MMS anymore. The kids and young adults all moved to Telegram, Discord, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc.
Further, it has required unsubscribe links to be included which allow you to opt out of any further communication. That is invaluable because you can't do that now with SMS.
I'm not discounting spam filters. They have certainly made life easier, but for things that _aren't_ caught by spam, I have at least some recourse by unsubscribing.
that's the neat part, you don't.
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%.
Right now, a lot of orgs will send you a text message when you initiate business with them, and the first message always informs you how to get off their list. If you do nothing, you remain on the list. With my way, they just send a "special" message asking to connect with you. If you do nothing, you don't hear from them.
The difference between a whitelist and a blacklist (current approach) is you don't have to do the work to keep getting off people's list. They do the work to get on your list.
1. Make the sources consistent
2. Separating out marketing vs "serious" sources.
There's a setting that only allows calls and texts from your own contacts, period. (Though anyone you've texted or called recently is allowed for a month.) Prior to enabling this I had all the usual stuff like Call Screening and even though it caught most spam I still was annoyed at seeing the silent notification that meant is was in the middle of getting a call, and honestly even the few junk calls that made it through just irritated me to no end.
> 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.
This stuff must be effective or else they wouldn't do it. On the other hand, it seems like a good way to discourage repeat donors. Why would I donate any money if the result is going to be endless texts and emails?
Heck, maybe they should offer a "premium donation" where you pay extra to not get on these lists, analogous to a no-ads streaming plan.
Are these messages effective on a significant enough portion of the population to be worth sending? It feels like it would have the opposite effect and piss people off. Who gets a text like this and goes "Oh wow yes I better send this person a dollar right away!"
The answer is yes, they do make a lot of money off of this. But the details are awful. Only like 12% of the revenue actually makes its way to productive campaigning. Donors are older on average than the average voter. And they hit whales. There are elderly people who donate many times a day. These are basically the same kinds of texts that scammers send and they catch people in almost exactly the same way.
Donations to democratic candidates by young people are down compared to prior elections while donations by the elderly are way up. Politicians are making these spam companies rich while they bleed their elderly voters dry and aggravate their future electorate. Idiocy.
Says something about the political climate of where I live.
I'm a little surprised by this. Due to the prevalence of spam, I favor private third-party messaging applications (slack, discord). Text messaging is about 50% garbage for me, and the majority I leave unread. Though contrary to the experience of a lot of others, I almost never get spam phone calls (probably <10 in the last two years), so that remains my highest signal channel.
I am not a Louella or a Brenda, more of a "Joe" or "Frank".
I am quite sure that ActBlue just creates a list of names, then create a wardial list and assign those names to a number.
Asking them to stop just confirms your number to work. And yes, it's ActBlue because they have specifically identified themselves as such more than once.
They probably did a fuzzy merge and your number (or a number typo'd to yours) got associated with some random old lady.
That's how I got on the lists of all the scummy PACs targeting elderly voters that Adam Bonica called out recently. I only figured it out because the cash for homes cold contacts trying to lowball his house will actually respond.
I have no idea if my number made its way onto new lists or if the problem just got worse in general, but it's making my phone borderline unusable. I miss any calls from legitimate unknown numbers because of it (delivery people, etc). I've also had my phone number for > 20 years at this point and I can't stand the thought of changing it.
You're lucky...
And then my wife has a completely different spray of spam. The amusing thing to me is that for both of us, while some of it is clearly a matter of what we're doing, she also has weird random stuff on those occasions I am tasked to find what happened to some email, and it's completely different weird random stuff.
I don't know what I did, but this election I've also been getting hammered by spam texts. I hadn't before. Not only that, it is as the author of this piece mentions, rather widely targeted. Messages that are clearly sent from the presumption that I agree with their politics despite very much not doing so... you know, the scare texts where they send "If you don't donate to us immediately the opponent is going to DO X IMMEDIATELY" and you're all like, my gosh, we should be so lucky that X would actually happen immediately but no, that's not actually going to happen. Clearly completely mistargeted. Which leads me to think even the ones I nominally wouldn't hate could well just be random luck too. And for me at least, this was a single change... from nothing last election to every single side and every shuckster trying to push poll me from every direction at once.
This year has been the worst I've ever seen. Hundreds of them so far.
I suspect this is another example of the pathetic form of American exceptionalism - "no way to prevent this, says the only country where this regularly happens".
Is there no regulator willing to step in to force the telcos to block spam and scam texts? If not, why not?
The biggest problem is many of these are scams and they rotate phone numbers so tagging doesn’t work.
The politicians use services which also rotate phone numbers.
I still haven’t found a perfect solution.
never had this issue on my personal android device, just my work iphone.
What makes this so much more frustrating is that I work in the telephony industry, and I know the hoops brands have to jump through to make calls or send SMS/MMS. I work with TCR for brand/campaign registration, I work with NetNumber and STIR/SHAKEN cert issuance for attestation levels. All of these hurdles for us, and it seemingly makes no impact in the real world for spam filtration.
No idea what kind of scams they are pushing but it seems very cheap and easy to abuse the system like this. I wish we could escalate this to operators and force them to deal with abusive customers properly like they clearly can't be bothered to do right now. Some countries probably have rules and regulations. Like Germany probably has. And yet, I get spam calls from German numbers on my own German number. So, clearly whatever there is, isn't working all that well.
I get like 10 spam emails in my Junk folder every day from the same domain but with different subdomains, which would be fine if I could define a rule to delete all emails with the matching root domain BUT rules don't work on the Junk folder (facepalm).
I can't fathom why are they not blocking the root domain outright, I'm pretty sure it's just for spam. It got so bad that, at some point I wrote a script that deletes these emails periodically - but getting that was not easy since I needed to use OAuth to get an token.