I receive a lot of work related SMS that are sent via an email-to-sms service. On my current phone (Samsung Galaxy SII, international version, GB-based ROM) the email address from which the message originated is shown as the sender of the SMS (in both the stock messaging app and GoSMS). On most other phones I’ve seen the sender is the number ‘100’ instead of the email address. I’ve even seen this behavior on other ROMs for SGSII (for SGSII users: I use a XW based ROM but I think that XX based ROMs show ‘100’ as sender).
Anyways, most of the time I need to block these messages - I only need the see them when I’m on call. To this end I have been using a simple app called SMS Filter (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nachev.apps.smsfilter). The interesting thing is that it seems to operate on a lower level than most messaging apps because here I can block the messages by blocking ‘100’. It appears that the sender email address is parsed from the message somewhere higher up in the messaging stack of the ROM.
And finally I get to where Avast comes into the picture…
After updating Anti-Theft to the latest version it warned me the “SMS Filter” could cause trouble for Anti-Theft so I started experimenting with using the “SMS and call filter” functionality provided by Avast instead but I cannot get it to work for these messages. For SMS sent from a normal phone everything works as expected but if I try to block ‘100’ the messages I want to block still slip trough. There is no simple way of adding email addresses to a group in Avast but even if I add an email address as a phone number for a contact and then add the contact to the group i Avast the messages are not blocked.
Any suggestions on how to solve this problem?
If not I would like to propose three features:
[ol]- The ability to block SMS from non-numerical senders
Adding non-numerical custom group members (preferably with wildcards)
Adding group members from list of received SMS[/ol]
did you try to enable “Offer to block messages” in application Settings? If it really arrives as an SMS and you don’t have the sender in your contacts, avast! should offer you adding the sender of such SMS to a group upon it’s arrival. You can then set up the group in any way you want.
Thank you for your quick response, Avast really has amazingly good support!
I had missed that setting and it did work the way you said it should. Blocking a message that way made me realize that the exact sender name was not just the email address but also a ‘:’ character. So if I add an email address with a colon appended as a phone number to a contact and then add that contact to a group messages are blocked as expected, i.e. Avast Mobile does not seem to have any issues blocking non-numeric senders (which I implied in my previous post).
Problem solved!
There are however two things that I think could be improved:
It would still be nice to be able to input other characters than digits when adding a custom sender to block.
It would also be nice if there was an optional notification when Avast offers to block an SMS from an unknown sender. As it works now I could get a message from an unknown sender that I don’t want to block but I won’t notice that message until I unlock the phone for some other reason.
I’m not from support, I actually developed the product, but I must agree that our support is doing brilliantly!
We are thinking about adding non-digit characters to the SMS/Call filter, but that actual involves some technical difficulties and is not as easy as it might sound (for example matching calls by caller’s name might be pretty tricky).
I don’t think we will add a completely new notification for that purpose since users are complaining about the one we already have there, adding a second one doesn’t seem to be a good idea But we might tweak the existing one to show if something “extraordinary” has happened, we will see.
I didn’t mean to make any assumptions on your role, I merely meant that the from a user’s point of view the support for the product is great
As for the notification I think that most people dislike permanent (ongoing) notifications much more than normal ones that you can remove once you’ve acted on them. And as long as it is optional I don’t see how anybody can have a problem with it. On the other hand, tweaking the existing ongoing notification sound like a good plan too. And if the tweaking include making it gray when nothing special has happened I think it’s great idea
Anyways, thanks for your replies keep up the great work!
It’s OK, I was just making a compliment to our support department!
Well, you can remove the ongoing notification as well and people still complain (although I must say they are complaining a little bit less than before when there was no such option). Not sure when the tweaking will happen since we are kinda busy at the moment, but it’s on my try-to-do list
