I recently received a message via BlackBerry Messenger from a friend who could not receive any SMS messages after her boyfriend was playing with her phone. I was stumped, initially, and assumed he had installed some type of app the blocked messages, however, after a bit of poking around in the settings on my BlackBerry I found the issue. My friends boyfriend inadvertently turned on SMS blocking in the BlackBerry Firewall…
Many people forget or just don’t know the BlackBerry comes with a built-in firewall. To find it go to Options | Security Options | Firewall.
The BlackBerry Firewall is an awesome utility for those times when you really need to focus, or, just want to relax. Say, for example, you get really tempted to read emails as they come in while you are driving. You can use the BlackBerry Firewall to block both Enterprise email and BIS. If your issue is SMS, you can turn this of as well, which, was the issue my friend was having. You can also restrict SMS, MMS, and BBM messages to be delivered only if the sender’s contact information is in your address book.
The best use of the firewall I can think of is when you go on vacation. If you are like many BlackBerry users your spouse hates the device as you are glued to it and constantly responding to email. On vacation the last thing you want is to deal with work email or a spouse getting annoyed with your inability to shut down. You don’t have to get crazy and power off your BlackBerry, leave it at home, or have IT disable your BES service you can simply enable the firewall on enterprise email and enjoy your vacation. Even better if you know you may get an email from someone that is urgent add them to the exemption list and all is well.
The BlackBerry Firewall is one of those built-in features that not a lot of BlackBerry users know about, but, trust me when I tell you that is sure can be useful during those times that you need it.
One thing to note is that the firewall does not actually stop the messages from being delivered, it just silently drops them. One should be careful to not enable blocking of a service on the misbelief that the carrier will no longer charge them. From a carrier perspective, they are still sending you text messages and data, but the BlackBerry simply does not display anything to the user with the exception of incrementally increasing the firewall counter for the respective service.
That is a very good point.
Also note that you don’t get delivery once you turn off the firewall. At least not SMS and MMS for sure. Some people mistakenly believe they will come in once the firewall is turned off. This can be good or bad depending on your expectations.
Hello all.
I have a BB Bold 9700 and am trying to use the SMS blcok. I enable the firewall, check the SMS block incoming messages and checked the except from contacts. Once enabled, I can no longer receive SMS messages from my wife who is obviously on my contact list. What’s happening? Looks like all SMS messages are being blocked.
Thanks
I have the same problem as georgeF, all my texts get blocked even when contacts are the exception makes no sense
can any one help all my apps are blocked bye firewall in and out of firewall
awful addition. all my texts keep being blocked by it. Doesn’t matter if i uncheck, it simply rechecks it