I have text to email set up because I often am not logged into SIP and regularly check my emails.
It’s a very convenient feature and makes it easy to get texts the way I prefer.
I have a friend (former friend, I guess) who is an alcoholic/drug user and has mental health issues and he’s recently had an episode and has developed irrational beliefs about me. I would normally just try to talk with him, but apparently he’s gossiping with other people and saying really awful things about me, which is too much for me to deal with because it affects my reputation and also feels like a betrayal of our friendship.
I blocked his number so he can’t call me, but I am still getting SMS to email, including ones sent late at night while he’s possibly using drugs.
I really don’t want to wake up to reading this. Although they are irrational messages, they still contain hurtful content. We also both lost a mutual friend recently and I’m dealing with grief. He has clinicians and a team of people in place to help him through this, it’s not something I need to handle. I also can’t force him to not use drugs.
I really would rather not change the number. I’ve had it for a while, I’m not sure of everyone who has it. I don’t know that many people, so perhaps I could just delete it. I like the number however.
My email provider doesn’t have email filter rules like gmail, but it does have extremely good privacy. Unless I change email providers, I won’t be able to filter these out and will end up reading them. I wish I could say I had the will power to immediately delete these without reading them when they get in my inbox, but I don’t.
Is there any possible way to deal with this other than deleting the number? I’m already just bummed out and struggling to get through this period of time and the texts he’s sending are really demoralizing. I also don’t want to escalate this by telling his cell phone company he’s sending abusive texts or getting a restraining order. I just want him totally blocked.
Why not creating a GMail address only for your SMS? Then you could forward all the desired SMS to your desired final email address. In all case, you also create a rule so that all emails are deleted, so you do not have to come back to the account to delete them. (Knowing that SMS are sent on all networks as clear text is totally relativizing the “privacy” issue in this case.) So GMail would be an easy filtering tool for you, and once setup properly, you never have to come back to it.
I do not know your email provider, but some give access to configure spam filtering tools where you could create a rule the delete any email that contains the undesired phone number. If not, GMail is a good and easy solution.
It’s a really good idea, but I really don’t like google’s privacy policies. They train their AI models on whatever data is in gmail (I could be wrong), and they also log everything and then emails sent to gmail are stored forever, even after deletion, according to some (this could be wrong). I don’t necessarily trust google to also not use the data for ads or sell it to data brokers, even if their privacy policy states otherwise, and I don’t feel comfortable with the way they’ve treated their employees at all times.
I know that often text messages are kept for many years anyway and that they are not private, and many companies use google in different capacities, but I put a lot of effort into trying to de-google as much as possible and I don’t really want google knowing my email address.
There’s another privacy-centered email company that would let me filter messages and send those with his # to the trash and then forward the other messages, but I’m not sure if that would work (I don’t know if I can have the rule be filter first then forward) and it would cost $40 a year and I’m trying to reduce expenses.
Voip.ms is so affordable and it would be easy to just get a new number and disable texts to that number. I could keep the number and just stop using it for now. I may end up doing that, which is awful. Doing that would cost $12 a year, plus the setup, for the new number. I could decide to delete the old number later or keep them both.
I understand your point of view. Even with emails there is also ne guaranties when you use a secure email provider that the whole route between servers is encrypted, and it is true for incoming and outgoing emails. It is more and more so, but not everywhere yet. Also, SSL is secure communication between servers, but unless encrypted, emails are still clear text and often kept on servers as such.
I use (among others) https://mxroute.com. They are a “host” email services. (There is a deal still available at 30$ every 3 years for 25GB storage.) I did not try it but you can modify spam assassin conf rules to mark as spam any email having the SMS phone number you do not want, then send these email to trash. But then you have to forward the emails, etc. This will not be an easy to setup just for what you want to do.
On voip.ms side, since this is not yet possible to block a phone number, you can indeed stop using SMS for a while on that number and get another number for SMS.
Knowing that your situation is most probably temporary, I would try to find a free solution—like GMail or any other that can do the same.
Maybe you could ask Michael Kourlas if the block feature on his Voip.ms SMS application is on the radar? But I think it will not be done soon as this is open since 2017. There is an issue on this:
This would be a nice feature in fact. It could automatically delete undesired SMS instead of displaying them. This is not totally block, but “auto-delete” feature.
See this post for the links to his app and GitHub:
You are not alone with not using Google services, but if you limit yourself to free email services, then your filtering options may be limited, as well.
On the other hand, one (paid but not expensive) mail service I use has a mail filter system that users can finely tune themselves via a simple script language - you can, for example, delete have certain messages deleted or redirected based on a word or number appearing in any of the addresses, the subject, or the body of the message. Another service I use comes with the cPanel, which also allows pretty good mail filtering. FWIW…
I may end up doing that, which is awful. Doing that would cost $12 a year, plus the setup, for the new number. I could decide to delete the old number later or keep them both.