Political campaign texts are relentless ahead of Election Day, with fundraising appeals piling up in Messages. One iPhone setting can silence their alerts without forcing you to block each unfamiliar number.

Blocking a number doesn't help much when the next fundraising appeal arrives from a different one. Political fundraising groups even raised objections when Apple expanded message filtering in iOS 26 , concerned that donation requests would go unnoticed.

Apple's Screen Unknown Senders feature separates messages based on whether you've established contact with the sender, not whether a message looks like spam. It moves texts from unfamiliar numbers into a separate folder and generally silences their notifications without preventing delivery.

The feature was off by default in iOS 26 unless you'd previously enabled the older Filter Unknown Senders setting.…