How to Move an Unknown Sender to Known Senders in Messages on iPhone

You may be familiar with the iPhone feature that allows you to filter your Messages inbox to Known and Unknown senders, which is handy if you find yourself getting a lot of messages you do not want from people you do not know. But what if you find someone you do know that has been stuffed into the “Unknown Sender” message inbox on your iPhone?

We’ll show you how you can move someone from the Unknown Sender list, to the Known Sender list on iPhone Messages.

How to Move an Unknown Sender to Known Sender in Messages on iPhone

Note the Filters capability will not be available to you if you do not have the message filtering feature enabled on your device, and thus this tip is not relevant to you.

1. Open the Messages app as usual
2. Tap on “Filters” and go to “Unknown Senders”
3. Locate the sender that you do know or that you want to move to “Known Senders” and open their message thread
4. Send a message reply to this person, it can be anything at all, but just the act of sending the message will move their message from Unknown to Known Senders
5. Repeat with other senders that you’d like to move to Known Senders from Unknown Senders if you wish

Simply by replying to their message, whether it’s a text message or iMessage, you will move them from Unknown Senders to Known Senders.

There’s no menu options or tweaks to move messages around between the filtered imessage inboxes, it’s just assumed that by replying to a person, you must know them, thus their messages move to your primary messages inbox again.

Note this is not possible if you have blocked their messages from your iPhone, since you won’t get messages from that person at all anymore, those messages will vanish into the ether to never be seen by anyone but the sender themself.

Thanks to Daniel for the tip idea in left in the comments.

Do you use message filtering on your iPhone? Have you used this trick to move someone from Unknown Senders to Known Senders? Let us know your experiences and thoughts in the comments.