block text messages sent from email

These are coming in as SMS (green bubble) texts which falls within the purview of cell service providers so no Apple cannot write code to prevent it. Spammers started this to get around blocking techniques that some cell service providers put in place. Check with your cell service provider and find out how to report them.

Actually, Apple aboslutely has the ability prevent these SMS messages from arriving on iOS or MacOS devices. A simple rule could be created that looks at the sender's address. If it is an email address (especially gmail, hotmail, live, etc.) then give an option to either never allow them to be presented in messages or filter them to the "unknown" senders.

But to be clear, the ultimate issue lies with Google and Microsoft since nearly all of the emails come from their email services. They could easily identify the accounts that are sending bit.ly links to large numbers of users simultaneously and shut those accounts down. As a matter of fact, they could build a rule in their systems to not allow that behavior at all. There is no legitimate business reason to allow them to do so.

No, actually they don’t. They can hide them based on the email address but that will eventually be pretty large database and new addresses will still come through. Again, SMS is under the purview of cell service providers, they won’t take kindly Apple writing code that hacks into their systems. And blocking three major email providers is not realistic. Neither is blaming them for this problem.

Yes...they do. Rules are pretty easy to put in place. But as I said, the issue is one that Google and MS should be solving since it is their platforms that are being used by spammers to annoy the rest of us.

I checked with the cell carrier (AT&T) - they said there is nothing they can do. They said the only option I had was to get a third party VPN, or change my phone number. It's horrible. The text is sent to 20-40 people, and to make it worse, many respond to all with Stop, Spam, Reported, ect.

Did you call or go to the store? On AT&T forward them to 7726 then send the email it came from when asked.

Reporting an email address to 7726 doesn’t work. It is expecting a phone number and see the email address as the spam message.

I went to the store. They said nothing could be done to block the email to text messages. They said I could report it, but there is no solution to block the next email.

You should have called AT&T instead. They are aware of the email related spam to multiple numbers and want them reported.