Blocking iPhone Phone Calls and Messages

You can easily block a phone number or Apple ID from calling your iPhone or sending you messages. Once you block a number, you can review the list and unblock any that may have been mistakes.

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Video Transcript: It's actually fairly easy to block a phone number on your iPhone. So say you've received a call on your iPhone and you didn't answer it. You declined it or you just missed the phone call. But you don't recognize the number. Maybe you even look it up online and find out it's junk so you want to block it so you don't get any phone calls from that number again. 
So go into your phone app. You want to go to Recents. Now in Recents you get a list of your recent phone numbers. Find the one that just called, maybe it was a few minutes ago, and you can tap the i button next to it. One of the options you've got here in addition to some standard stuff you may want to use if it's a legitimate phone call like, you know, creating a new contact or adding to an existing contact, is Block this Caller there at the bottom. So just tap that and it will give you a confirmation here and you hit Block Contact. It's as simple as that. That phone number is now blocked and you won't get calls anymore from that number. 
Unblocking is pretty simple. You can see I've got Unblock this Caller right here on the screen.  So I can return through either the Recents list and simply unblock if I've made a mistake. 
However if it's much later on I may not find it in my Recents List. I can go, instead, into Settings. Under Settings I can look for the option here for Phone settings. In phone settings  we should find the option for Call Blocking. It's going to give us a list of the blocked contacts. This will not only show you blocked phone numbers but also blocked ID's for messaging that you may have blocked as well. You can tap on a number and see it or you can Edit and then Unblock by hitting the little red button on the left and then hitting the Unblock button. You can also just swipe to the left to bring up an Unblock button like that. 
So it's fairly easy to go and review your blocked contacts if you find out that there's some number from work or something like that and you blocked it and now the person can't get through to you. You just didn't recognize the number. You can go through this list and find them there. 
You can do the same with Messages. So you're in the Messages app and you get a message from someone and you want to block them. You may see the Report Junk button there. But if you just really want to block them so you never get messages again tap the i button at the top right and then you can see the person's information there at the top and there's a little FaceTime button and a phone call button. Just tap on the left where it just has their name and then it brings up basically a contact and you can hit Block this Caller and you can block that contact as well.
So that's how you can block messages even if it's not coming from a phone number. If it's coming from an Apple ID this will work to block it.

Comments: 9 Responses to “Blocking iPhone Phone Calls and Messages”

Reinhold Linnartz

7 years ago

Very good, this can be done!
Thank you very much!

Reinhold

Jummy

Very helpful video. Does the blocked caller no they have been blocked ?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jummy: I've never tried it, but I believe that Messages are just never "delivered" so they don't know -- your phone could be off, or they could be sending to an ID that doesn't exist. For calls, your phone never rings and it just goes to voicemail. I think the voicemails are in a separate category for blocked callers.

Robin Oram

Yes but ... you still can’t block “no caller ID” calls; infuriating! (Or is there a way?)

Peggy

Thank you so much! Had no idea this was possible.

Robin: Try it next time and see what happens. I don't see any calls on my phone with no caller ID. I have seen spammers use a name like "Unknown" or "No ID" as their actual name to try to trick you into thinking there is no phone number coming though. So maybe that is what you are seeing? Another option is to contact your phone service provider and see if they have a way to block those on their end.

Barry Chertov

I'm also looking for a way to block No Caller ID. The best I've come up with is to leave Do Not Disturb on and then set Allow Calls From to all your contacts. But this also blocks calls from anybody (unblocked) not in your contact list. Any better ideas? Sure seems like there should be a way!

Steve P

I wish the list of calls would show an indicator (red dot, maybe?) of the ones I've blocked. It's also unclear to me whether deleting the blocked phone # from the list means it's no longer blocked or are blocked #'s somehow "saved" in a separate list?

Steve: Deleting the blocked number from the list, like I show later in the video, means it is no longer blocked.

Comments Closed.

Blocking iPhone Phone Calls and Messages

Comments: 9 Responses to “Blocking iPhone Phone Calls and Messages”

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