How to send STOP to SMS spam using iOS automation

stop_sms_spam_on_ios.md

Credit to Time Johnsen

⚠️ Please consider that this might not be a good idea. It's up to you. I feel like spammers are going to spam, so, idk.

How to Automatically Reply Stop to SMS Spam

1. Open Shortcuts
2. Click the bottom tab Automation at the bottom center. It's not Shortcuts, it's Automation.
3. Create a new Automation using + at the top. This will open Personal Automation and you'll be looking at a list.

4. Select the green bubble Message to start creating an Automation and then you'll see this When screen.

5. Leave Sender blank.
6. Message Contains will be whatever you want and you will probably need multiple of them since we can't do matching afaik.

• TEXT STOP TO QUIT
• TEXT STOP TO END
• Reply Stop to End What I would do is use the "Stop to End" part of "Reply Stop to End" but then if they say "Stop To End" it won't match. So, you'll have to play with this or make multiple automations. 😔 This is why I made this gist.

7. Select Run Immediately (new feature!)

8. Click Next

9. On this screen click New Blank Automation

10. Click Add Action

11. In Search for apps and actions, search for Variable and select Set Variable

13. Click Variable Name and set it to Sender and leave Shortcut Input alone.

14. Click Done to go back to adding actions. Search for another action below the Set Variable you just set and find Send Message under Sharing. Now we need to edit the Send message action because it's wrong here. Just showing you the weird screen flow.

15. Click "x Sender" and set this to our stop message. Click Clear Variable.

16. The variable is cleared and then it says Send "Message" to. Click Message. If the spammer is saying send STOP then we put STOP here. If they said Stop then put Stop here.

17. For Recipients we need to long press to pull up a menu and select our Sender variable.

18. Then click Done to finish up your Automation.

Oof. That was a lot. You should have an automation like When I Get a Message Containing 'STOP2END' ... Send Message but you'll have to repeat this for all the different spamming messsages. 😔 Hopefully one day we don't have to do this anymore.

I added a bit onto this to also block the number. You need to create a contact with a fake phone number and block that contact. Then this adds the senders number to that contact, blocking the number.