I’m sick of political spam texts. Here is a stupid solution.

I’m not telling you that you should do this. But this morning I made my phone auto-respond “STOP” to any unknown number:

Sharing iOS automations is weirdly annoying (it’s easy to share shortcuts via iCloud, but I built this directly into an automation and I can’t make an iCloud link for it), so here is the logic written out: 

Make an automation that runs whenever a message contains " "
Have it do the following:

* Get phone numbers from shortcut input; call that P
* Find all contacts where ALL of the following are true:
    * Phone Number is P
    * Company is not "ignore" (this is mostly for testing)
* Assign those contacts to C

* If C does not have any value
* Send STOP to P
* Otherwise do nothing

You could imagine extending this to look for keywords (like politician names) before responding, or to send a follow-up message explaining that the STOP was automated. But I do think it’s kinda funny to need to explain this behavior when I give someone my number.

Anyway the video above uses fake phone numbers1 but the logic totally works. Here’s a vid of me scrolling through the automation if that’s helpful.

Anyway, uh, enjoy.

It’d be nice if there was a real way to opt out of texts like this!

  1. I changed my and my girlfriends contact names to be fake numbers and set our companies to “ignore” to trigger the automation ↩