All I have is a flip-phone, so Google is the best I could do.

Hopefully this will help.

@Brian1946 Thanks. That’s a help. It doesn’t actually bock them but they won’t show up in my regular messages.

Curious about the same thing.

Sometimes I wonder if blocking the callers actually increases my text spam because I’m more or less confirming that this number is active. :/

@janbb: GQ. I have the same problem within the past two or three months. Group texts from some unknown person. Not too often, maybe once every two weeks, but annoying.

Of course, if you “filter unknown senders” that means no one can ever communicate with you unless you first put their number in your phone’s address book…

@Zaku No – the way it works is that it is sorted out so you can choose that filter and display them if you want to check those. You can also opt for “all messages” and see them all.

I went to the Apple store and asked one of the “geniuses” there this same question. And the answer is no, you can’t block them outright. You can only “filter” them, as described above, which means sorting them out automatically into a different group of messages, which you can choose to view—or not.

@2davidc8 Thanks. That’s what I did following Brian’s link.

It’s unfortunate that you can’t go to the Unknown Sender message folder, identify, and then block the sender.

I know the article’s author conflated blocking with filtering, but in a sense I guess one could say that messages from the unknown senders will be “blocked” from one’s regular inbox.

@janbb But you’d need to choose one of those other settings in order to see calls from someone not in you address book, right?

Another trick, is to set your default ring tone to silence, and then give an audible ring tone to anyone whose calls you want to hear. Then you still see notifications that others called, but don’t get rung for them.

@Zaku I have that setting already on my phone. That comes up as silenced call with the number. No ring.

This is for text messages and I don’t mind have to switch the filter periodically to see text messages from sources that are not my contacts.