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Whether you’re trying to get rid of spam or avoid hearing from a former friend or ex, blocking someone’s phone number is a vital tool for helping to preserve your privacy. We’ve covered various methods of protecting yourself from robocalls, spam, and other daily annoyances. But blocking a number is often the quickest and easiest way of shutting down unwanted digital intrusions.

When you block a number, you’ll no longer receive phone calls, texts, or FaceTime requests that come in from the blocked number. The person at the other end will go straight to voicemail whenever they call you, but this is their only clue that they’ve been blocked. Texts will still appear to go through as normal — even though you don’t have to deal with them.

Blocked numbers are still able to leave voicemails, but these won’t be shown in the standard visual voicemail list. Instead, they’re separated into a “blocked messages” section that you can choose to ignore completely.

On an iPhone, there are multiple methods for blocking a number, but I’m going to cover the two apps where you’d most often want to do so.

If someone is annoying you via text (or you want to cross off another source of spam), it’s easy to block a number directly from Apple’s Messages app.

If you want to restore someone’s ability to reach you, it’s easy to remove any number from your blocked list.

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