Don’t
you hate it when your Android vibrates with a new message notification
and turns out that you have just received yet another spam or a
promotional text message from your mobile service provider? Then there
are those funny text messages from friends which arrive once in a while,
taking the focus away from your work and cluttering up your messages
folder like anything.
Your
mobile number is in the database of so many companies and they will
continue to send spam and promotinal messages at regular intervals. The
only way to block unwanted SMS messages on your Android is to install an
SMS blocker application and in this tutorial, I am going to explain how
you can block text messages from a specific number, keywords or from a
specific contact in your phone’s address book.
Go to Google Play (Android Market) and install this SMS blocker application.
This is a free application which will allow you to define a blacklist
of numbers so that text messages from these numbers won’t appear in your
main inbox.
Once
you have installed the app, run the application and hit the menu button
on the right. next select “Add new”, this will allow you to select the
spam sources from your main message inbox.
You
can also choose to add specific numbers manually or choose to populate
the blocked list directly from your Phone’s address book. I would advise
to choose the sources from your inbox first and customize other
settings later on.
Once
you have added all the numbers to the blocked list, the app will move
the existing spam messages out of the main inbox. You can see the entire
list from the “blocked” tab, an example is shown below:
Rest of the settings are pretty simple and straight forward. The “Allow” tab lets you setup a safe list of contacts and numbers so that text messages from these sources are never blocked. You can also setup keyword filters in the “Filter” tab and enter specific words which are frequently used by spam or unknown sources. Overall, blocking sms messages on Android has never been this easy and I wonder why Google has not yet enabled this feature by default.
Tip: If you want advanced features like blocking calls and messages from unwanted numbers, install the Advanced call blocker app (premium).
