Email spam is something that we've grown so used to these days. It's the downside of your email address being anywhere on the internet, as one innocent newsletter signup leads to a bombardment of offers and unnecessary messages.
Thankfully there are filters in place to deal with a lot of the garbage that floods our inboxes, but there's one area of our lives that's prone to nearly daily spam – SMS.
Yes, in the year 2020 it's apparently still a thing to send an SMS to people. And trust us, we've seen our fair share of SMS spam. Whether it's new property investments, a bank loan offer, 20% of your next food order, or just some other rubbish, it's often hard to deal with the constant flood of spam messages.
There are some apps that offer to help filter your SMS spam and automatically delete them for you, but the problem with these apps is that the SMS message is still delivered to your phone anyway – you just don't see it. That could be a problem if you're travelling and have your phone on roaming – you'll still be charged for the spam SMS reaching you.
If you're an Etisalat subscriber, you can block a particular SMS sender by texting B followed by the sender's ID, to 7726. But if you've got a long list of pesky SMS spam to block, this can really take a while to do, so thankfully there's an easier way to do this directly through Etisalat's website.
How to block SMS spam through the Etisalat website
To get started, log on to your Etisalat Self Care account on Etisalat.ae with your registered user ID and password. Once logged in, on the top right under your account ID, click 'My Etisalat'
Next, click 'My Account' and click the phone number that's registered to you.
You'll then be taken to your main account where you can look at your account usage, bill history, and other information related to your Etisalat account. Here, click the 'Service Details' tab,
There are two things you want to do on this page. The first is to click the toggle next to 'Etisalat Marketing Calls' – this stops Etisalat Customer Care from calling you with offers related to upgrading your phone package.
Below this, you'll find a list of all the SMS messages you've received in the past 7 days. For any sender that you want to block, simply find them on the list and click the 'Block' button. The system will prompt you to confirm the block, and once you select Yes, you'll get an SMS that the block has been applied.
If you ever want to unblock someone in the future, just scroll down the page and you'll see the list of numbers that have been blocked – just click 'unblock' to allow their messages to come through again.
Be cautious with your blocking
A word of caution however – it's not a good idea to block messages from important services such as your bank or utilities provider, as often the same message sender is used to send two-factor authentication codes for online transactions. So just be careful when you block certain numbers, or you might not be able to use these facilities online until you unblock them.
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