Better SMS notification idea

General Computing
1

Continuing the discussion from What SMS app do you use on Android?:

For SMS apps, it would be great to have a notification setting as follows.

If the number is in my contacts, notify as normal with the ding and the drop-down.

If the number is not in my contact, notify me silently so that I see that text whenever I happen to check my notifications in the status bar.

Would go a long way to minimize the nuisance of spam texts while keeping that channel open for the people texting you who you just don’t have in your contacts. Just had to put the idea out there and see what the universe has to say.

1 Like
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Simple SMS Messaging has the block all messages not from contacts and that’s a problem as you described.

I would like contact apps to change notification sounds as they allow custom ringtones

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Thank you for referring to me as “The Universe”. It is my preferred pronoun.
Sounds like a simple and useful solution.

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Simple SMS messaging block all messages not a contact is not working as I think it should. I just got a group message and had the option to block all numbers in that group. They all should have been blocked.

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Wish I could do the same for spam calls… but sometimes calls from numbers that aren’t in my contacts are actually important, like banks and education.

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Related to spam calls, SimpleLogin emails work for the National Do Not Call registry. ASAP when I get a new number, I register it, even if I plan on keeping the new number for 90 days.

7

This looks like a good spot to say that, in QKSMS+ if you change a contacts notifications sound and then delete that conversation the contacts notification sound goes back to default sound. It is more like a conversations notifications sound.
Using Contacts from CalyxOS you can select your contact, select to message, opening a new conversation, change the notification sound and then exiting with out starting a conversation and then the notification sound is persistent.
I do not recall this issue with Signal in the past.
I delete SMS messages older than a month, and sensitive messages as the topic changes. My default notification sound is silent.

8

This might be irrelevant (apologies if it is) but I wouldn’t (and don’t) use SMS for anything that I wish to keep private. There’s simply nothing you can do to make SMS messages secure. Unless for example if you DIY E2EE by manually encrypting the message on your end using a key that the receiver is already aware of, or using asymmetrical encryption (the receiver’s public key). But at that point just use signal or wire.