SMS Shield Takes Advantage of iOS 11 Machine Learning to Filter Spam and Phishing Text Messages
Nobody likes being spammed, and we like phishing attacks even worse. Phishing attacks are when a nefarious person or organization pretends to be someone you trust, to get your personal information. This is bad enough in email, but text messages are far more trusted most of the time. For the best protection, SMS Shield offers you state-of-the-art filtering that uses Apple's new ML (Machine Learning) technology to recognize spam and phishing texts before they get to be a problem.
SMS Shield was developed specifically for iOS 11, utilizing ML to detect and stop spam before it can get under your skin.
Spam or phishing text messages are growing. Psychologically, people tend to trust SMS messages more, and some of the stats suggest that text messages are opened within three seconds 90 percent of the time.
The total open rate for SMS messages is 98 percent, compared to 20 percent for emails.
Quite a few of these opened SMS messages are phishing or hack attacks, and they work. That's why banking customers, in particular, continue to lose millions of dollars each year to SMS phishing attacks.
That's where SMS Shield comes in. It's a machine-learning-based SMS spam and phishing filter that can recognize potential threats without ever being told they're risky.
To enable the filter, once you've installed the app, you need to visit Settings > Messages > Unknown & Spam, and toggle SMS Shield on.
Once you've done that, the app will go to work detecting spam and filtering it out of your mail Messages inbox. You won't miss a thing, I promise — the spam or phishing SMS messages aren't deleted until you want them to be. They just go to a different tab in your Messages app.
Perhaps the most advanced SMS spam filter available
We love SMS Shield not only because it's super-intelligent, but because it's always learning. While our testing didn't find the app to be 100 percent perfect, it was amazingly accurate.
If you happen to receive a spam or phishing message that SMS Shield doesn't filter, it's easy to let the developers know about it. First, copy the spam or phishing text message.
Then, just go to the SMS Shield app, tap on Report an SMS, and paste the offending message into the field. The developers will feed that into their ML algorithm, so SMS Shield will become even more intelligent.
The app also features a "Frequent traveler" mode. If you enable that feature, SMS Shield also recognizes text messages carriers sometimes send you when you're roaming internationally, and filters them away from your view.
That way, you don't get bogged down reading SMS messages that you really don't care about.
You can also make use of a custom block list, where you can input phone numbers (even using wildcards, like 330-759-320*) to filter out specific numbers or short codes.
Finally, SMS Shield supports more than just English. The app also provides support for Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic. The developers are open to other languages, so don't think they're just going to rest on their laurels now that the app is released.
If you're plagued with spam messages or phishing attempts through SMS, you need a smart filter. SMS Shield is the smartest one I've found, and it's growing more intelligent every day.
Enabling SMS Shield's filter
You'll have to do a tiny bit of Settings legwork before SMS Shield can do its thing.
Feature-packed and always learning
SMS Shield is always learning, especially with your help. It's also got all of the features you could ask for.
