The Do Not Call list does nothing for SMS or anything but voice calls. The Do Not Call list only prevents legitimate companies which are cold-calling you. Do Not Call cannot prevent the scams or criminals, and it cannot prevent anyone who has already established an "existing business relationship" including political campaigns and non-profit fundraisers. I've been on DNC for decades and, thankfully I do not receive many bad calls at all, but it's difficult to say how much to attribute to DNC itself.

I receive, however, a fair measure of suspicious SMS, real-estate scams, political campaigns both legit and sus, and some pretty slick "USPS shipping" RCS phishing messages.

Now my Pixel Pro has a lot of spam protections and I need to leave them all completely disabled, because I routinely need to answer inbound voice calls from sketchy numbers, time-sensitive, because they could be a delivery driver or a taxi service. I just never know. The app does tag known spammer numbers, which sometimes turn out legit after all?

I consider SMS the worst mode of communication bar-none. It's locked to a single device with a single SIM. They can't be categorized, organized, tagged, forwarded, managed en masse, exported, or anything. To me it's a single-stream jumble of electronic jerks demanding my immediate attention and reactions over a most impersonal medium. I likewise disdain voice calls in many cases, so don't get me started.