Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

Why Apple’s New SMS Filters Could Tank Your Deliverability

16 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:05

In this podcast excerpt, the host and SMS marketing expert Jimmy Kim discuss Apple’s newly introduced SMS spam filters that automatically block messages from unknown numbers and allow users to flag messages as junk. They explain how these mechanisms can quickly lead to carriers throttling or even blocking a sender’s messages if enough complaints are received. Jimmy emphasizes that this shift makes SMS deliverability as critical as email deliverability, urging marketers to adopt rigorous list hygiene, reasonable sending frequency, and to ensure each text provides real value. He notes that best practices evolve into legal expectations as the ecosystem reacts, and encourages listeners to explore their earlier episode on list hygiene for deeper guidance.

Apple's spam filters now is filtering out unknown numbers, right? And then the kind of the report quote unquote junk feature means if you're sending irrelevant SMS campaigns or automations, whatever it might be, you can get flagged fairly quickly. It's very easy to get flagged actually. If you get enough flags, you know, carriers are going to start potentially throttling or even worse, blocking your messages entirely.
Yeah. And that probably is the next generation of how deliverability in SMS becomes more relevant is that throttling and blocking that might occur. And we have to respect these channels just like email. And I think this is something that marketers are going to start learning because SMS is something that people poorly are doing things like list hygiene. And I know we just did a pod on list hygiene. If you haven't heard it, you should go back and listen to it. We talked about the importance of doing it because these are not, you know, they're best practices today, but eventually best practices become legal or law or ways that things are behaving. They don't become best practice just because someone said it. It's usually because there's a reaction that's happening. So making sure you're keeping SMS frequency reasonable and ensuring that there's real value in every text is really important.
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