Hacker News Reader

Comment by snailmailman | Hacker News Reader

iMessage is just about the only form of communication that I’ve NEVER received any spam through. I get spam SMS all the time and spam calls all the time. I get spam emails 24/7, and even spam DMs on any social media platform that has DMs.

There is no iMessage spam. Apple has it tightly controlled and locked down. I can kinda see why Apple wants to preserve their ecosystem.

But also, there are so many other options in this space. Signal, WhatsApp, etc. Apple is even finally adding RCS support. I don’t understand why so many people want iMessage on other platforms? It’s not that different.

View on HN

I get iMessage spam all the time, Apple even has a report spam feature so it’s clearly an issue. I guess you’re just lucky but it definitely exists. I got four just in the last day even.

Wonder what the cause is? I don’t think I’ve literally ever received a spam on iMessage

I think I’ve maybe gotten two in the entire history of owning an iPhone.

I know people who have never gotten a single one, I know people who have gotten a bunch and hate it.

Peoples experience seems to really vary.

I get 1-2 per year. Usually from an iCloud address to my phone and a bunch of sequential numbers in my exchange.

Far as I can tell they’re all sent to my icloud address. Flip side I basically never get spam calls.

It is conclusively trivial to automate the iMessage client using accessibility APIs and in fact this has been done many times before to great effect by numerous developers to implement everything from auto responders to bridges for iMessage from other systems... including by Beeper for prior versions of their product!

And like, hell: you mention "social media platforms", but they also have been known to put in lots of effort at times to break alternative clients... Meta, in particular, sometimes goes to lengths sufficiently annoying that a ton of real users using browser extensions on Instagram/Facebook get caught in the cross-fire.

If you want to send spam over iMessage, the thing preventing that is categorically--and, frankly, obviously to anyone who is willing to question Apple's PR spin--not (and never was) the inability to use it from a device running Android or anything about the inscrutability of its protocol being documented and re-implemented by others.

It does have spam, there's nothing preventing scammers to buy boxes of old half broken phones and turning them into relays and that's exactly what they are doing.

> There is no iMessage spam

There actually is — I get it regularly, despite keeping my phone number relatively private.

It's not zero. I receive a few spam iMessages a year.

But it's definitely orders of magnitude below SMS/calls.

>But it's definitely orders of magnitude below SMS/calls.

SMS and call spam are big annoyances but can also be dealt with. On my Android, the Google messaging app is really good at stopping them.

I doubt that Apple doesn't have the tech competency or the money to either build, license or acquire a really good spam filter. Heck, they can acquire every single spam filter company and start-up in the world and their money pile would barely dip.

The Messages app supports filtering extensions. I use a free one called Bouncer where I configured some regular expressions to auto-junk things, but there are far more sophisticated extensions available.

I’ve had the same experience, never had any spam through iMessage. It certainly happens, but it’s pretty rare and doesn’t happen to everyone

I agree, Apple has no interest in fighting spam from users onboarded by Beeper. That’s likely the biggest issue with this and more generally opening iMessage to wider audience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com