Personalyze whatsapp filters

[JFMeraki]

Hi, they sey me once that it is possible allow Whatapp (for example) for all users, but block images or links, how is this possible?

I wish the same for other apps, like telegram or messenger.

My idea is only have enabled message text.

[NolanHerring]

I'm not aware of any way to do this with Meraki

I know I have been on an airplane and I was able to use WhatsApp for messages, but it would not let me send images/photos/video. I was curious because WhatsApp is encrypted end-to-end so my suspicion is that there is a device or software that is not allowing traffic of a certain size 'over X value' to be passed.

[JFMeraki]

Hi there. So, the company who made this initial config of meraki, 2 years ago, the guy behind the scenes was the first he tell me about the appliance, i was amazed beacause segmentation of filtering was the first i wrote on my note book and i remember what he tellme about it. Unfortnatelly im not with that company now... but keep on searching. Tks.

[NolanHerring]

Actually there might be a solution here that you could try 😃

http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/networking/networking2015/1570062089.pdf

" To identify the FQDNs used by the WhatsApp service, we rely on manual inspection of hybrid measurements. We actively generate WhatsApp text and media flows at end devices (both Android and iOS), and passively observe them at two instrumented access gateways. We especially paid attention to the DNS traffic generated by the devices. Not surprising, our measurements revealed that WhatsApp servers are associated to the domain names whatsapp.net (for supporting the service) and whatsapp.com (for the company website). In addition, different third level domain names are used to handle different types of traffic (control, text messages, and multimedia messages). Control and text messages are handled by chat servers associated to the domains {c|d|e}X.whatsapp.net (X is an integer changing for load balancing), whereas multimedia contents are handled by multimedia (mm) servers associated to the domains mmsXYZ.whatsapp.net and mmiXYZ.whatsapp.net for audio and photo transfers, and mmvXYZ.whatsapp.net for videos. As we see next, chat and mm servers have very different network footprints. While connections to chat servers are characterized by low data-rate and long duration (specially due to the control messages), media transfers are transmitted in short and heavy flows. "

From this article it looks like you could block say images or videos specifically, but allow things like text messages etc. I have a feeling this is how airliners do it now that I discovered this.

So I 'think' that if you block the following:

mm*.whatsapp.net*
pp*.whatsapp.net*

Then you won't be able to send media, but texts should still work.  In theory of course.