Blocked contacts limit reached

Delete all but those specific phone numbers that you know and that make repeated calls, and enable and use the call-screening and silence-unknown-callers features to reduce the phone spam, and maybe also an app such as Bouncer to filter text messages with specific words or specific patterns.

Blocking spam by adding numbers doesn’t work. Not until you incrementally add enough numbers to reach a chunk of the world’s entire total theoretical number of phone numbers. This because spammers pick random numbers and don’t repeat the same calling numbers. Each call is from a “new” number. Either chosen at random within an exchange, or within the same area code, or country, or a random phone number from anywhere in the world.

They don’t call again from the same numbers.

And they’re not actually calling from the number shown.

Which is why this blocking doesn’t work.

There are other recent discussions of this mechanism, as well.

TL;DR: enable call screening, and silence unknown callers.

Screen and block calls on iPhone - Apple Support

Thanks for the prompt information. Upon further research with ChatGPT, the issue was that the 3,000 blocked contact limit had been exceeded. This limit is apparently in the Golden Gate 27.0 just released. My computer had over 5,000 blocked contacts from many years of using Apple Mail.

Note: The blocked contacts are listed in the System Settings-Privacy and Security. Deleting those contacts took a while and the Privacy and Security kept "Not Responding" after each delete.

The limit of 3,000 was not added in Golden Gate, that is just where the message you see was added. Previously the limit was still there and even allowed you to add additional contacts beyond the limit and they had no effect on actually blocking the contact. That bug was resolved where now you see the message and you will need to get your contacts under 3,000 for them to be effective.

You should have been able to bulk delete those blocked contacts by clicking one contact and shift-clicking another to select an entire range that can be deleting all at once by pressing the minus button. If you have an iPhone using the same Apple Account, those will also by synced there and is the preferred method for bulk deleting contacts since on the iPhone it is one at a time.

A Not Responding message may be caused if you have a VPN installed or other network altering process running on your computer in the background. Others would be things like Little Snitch or a software Firewall as those deletions are attempting to update on the iCloud server for your account and the processes may interfere with that connection.

Anyway, if you are now under 3,000, you should be golden (pun intended). MrHoffman provided great information on the misconception by some who think blocking is a form of spam control and it is not.

Thanks for the clarification. Much appreciated