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I mean, a legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you. I normally have unknown callers disabled and don't have any proble
by thewebcount 4y ago
I mean, a legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you. I normally have unknown callers disabled and don't have any problems. I had to turn it off this week because we have a few maintenance things going on and need to answer calls about when people are going to be coming and going for repairs. But otherwise, I turn it off and have never had any issues with not getting critical calls. You can always turn it on if you know you'll be getting an unknown call in the next 24 hours.
- coryfklein 4y agoI have indeed tried this turn it on, turn it off, strategy. Every time it has ended because I forgot to turn it off and I ended up missing a critical phone call; some service person called before coming for a home maintenance appointment to make sure we were present so they could enter the premises, and the call goes to voicemail which I only notice an hour later after they've decided to reschedule fixing my AC to 3 days later and now we have to endure the sweltering 98°F weather for 3 more days all to avoid the nuisance of robocallers.
- jchw 4y agoIf you have something that urgent it's better to preemptively turn it off. Yeah yeah, easier said than done, but as a habitual Do Not Disturb user, this has worked well for me.
- coryfklein 4y agoWhat's the connection to Do Not Disturb? I still haven't explored that functionality fully, and it seems Apple has built it out significantly. I suspect I could benefit by using it better to establish a "at work mode" and a "at home mode", in addition to my current simple usage of "you sure as hell better not wake me up at 3 AM with a notification".
- aaronbeekay 4y agoThat’s exactly what they’ve been adding, actually. You can also set a schedule for which mode is active or trigger them with automations.
- ryandrake 4y agoI do "Do Not Disturb" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No calls, no texts, no notifications, no nothing. Yes, Apple has indeed built it out recently. At least on iOS, you can add exceptions if you want, like your favorites, or your contact list, or even specific people. You can also put it on a schedule if you think 24/7 is too extreme. Honestly, I don't worry about the "urgent call from the doctor" scenario, and I have a family. If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail. For 99% of the calls I get, it's not even remotely important. I don't structure my life around outlier scenarios. Not having a phone constantly dinging and buzzing for my attention is worth missing the extremely rare emergency.
- paul7986 4y agoYou can also have all numbers (calls) not in your contacts just go straight to voicemail via the "Silence Unknown Number," feature within the phone settings.
- ysavir 4y ago> If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail. How do you test for this?
- Arrath 4y agoWhy, if they don't leave a voicemail, it must not have been an important call!
- amerkhalid 4y agoI don't know if this is some sort of convention or just a lot of coincidences but it seems when it is an urgent call, everyone calls twice. And they leave voicemail on the second call. This includes stuff like people running late, calls from daycare, etc. For non-urgent matters like payments, they call once and leave a voicemail.
- ghaff 4y agoSPAM calls are annoying but not to the point where I'm willing to basically significantly reduce the utility of owning a phone. I get that some people basically don't take phone calls. But others have elderly relatives, service people for their house, etc. and "just make them leave a voicemail" isn't always a satisfactory solution.
- lazide 4y agoI personally get 50+ spam calls on some days. I’m not in the parent posting chain, but what other option do I have?
- gnopgnip 4y agoThe law changed around a year ago with shaken/stir authentication being required. You can enable call filtering with your carrier to block most robocalls based on this data. There are iphone and android app based solutions that will block more, based on previous reports, on information about the number, the timing. Like HIYA. You can configure all unknown callers to go to voicemail. Setup an exception if the same number calls you twice. If you are getting 50+ spam calls a day changing your number is another option. And if you change your number you can more easily block caller ID spoofers that use a very similar number that isn't really local.
- munk-a 4y agoWhile I agree that this might be a practical and effective step... changing my number costs me a lot of money in terms of lost revenue and expenses, I have business cards to reprint and contacts (business and personal) that I'll need to update. Considering phone companies could simply block these calls if they so desired I don't see why I, the customer, need to absorb such a large cost just to keep my life sane and, after absorbing such a cost the robo calls might just find me again. I receive more spam calls than spam emails and, being familiar with the underlying technical details of each system, that is absolutely ridiculous. Email was built in a time of pure optimism, there is no central switching authority for emails and there is no cost to sending an email other than jiggling some electrons - telephone calls are highly metered and monitored, they generally pass through several organizations that have been endowed with a high measure of trust to police and shepard them to their final destination. There is no reason other than the monetization of the system that these spam calls are allowed to exist.
- paul7986 4y agoTry to see if they can text you instead
- notyourwork 4y agoSo let’s not use a phone for calling anymore?
- paul7986 4y agosure just not the old telephone system (especially for inbound calls) rather text me or audio or video chat with me through an app where I've added you as my contact. Ive never received a spam call through a chat app like Messenger before. I have to add them as a contact first. In 21st century the old telephone system doesnt work anymore.
- lazide 4y agoThat’s basically where we are at, with the exception of big businesses and institutions often refuse to deal with you except for in-person or over the phone.
- Arrath 4y agoCan we? Sometimes a conversation can be handled in a couple succinct texts without the need to be dragged out vocally. Other times it can't and by all means call, but do I ever get tired of the awkward chit chat that some people insist on.
- tshaddox 4y agoThat was probably supposed to be sarcasm, but yes, absolutely, let's not use a phone for voice calls anymore. That nonsense should have sailed 10 years ago.
- notyourwork 4y agoI personally have found interfacing with businesses dysfunctional at best today. Auto-mated prompts that send you in infinite loops, email and text services that create async communication making it 10x as long to address my query. The idea that speaking to someone on the phone should cease is laughable.
- dapearce 4y agoI wish you could apply it to specific area codes. The area code of my phone number is not an area I have lived in for several years now. 98% of my spam calls are from this area code but none of the important unknown callers are calling from this area code.
- xigency 4y agoI tried to do this manually for a filter on the last four digits. Phones don’t really handle a 10,000 number blocklist well.
- supertrope 4y agoSwitch to a SIP VoIP provider with a powerful control panel. Create a rule that same area code callers have to press a digit to ring through. Since spam comes from random area codes I have this applied to all non-contact list callers.
- erickhill 4y ago"A legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you." Unfortunately so do the scammers - both bots and actual people. At least my phone will sometimes text-transcribe the VM so I can quickly scan it and delete it w/o being forced to listen to it.
- yourapostasy 4y agoI’d like a calendar appointment feature where I specify when to disable/enable allowing unknown numbers to ring.
- oefrha 4y agoApproximately 100% of my voicemails are from spammers or scammers.
- paul7986 4y agoNot sure if your an iOS user but i'd love to be able to quickly toggle "Silence Unknown Callers," like i can with wifi, bluetooth, airplane mode, the flashlight and etc (swipe up from the bottom menu). Right now I have to drill down three to four steps (menus) to turn it on and off.
- orev 4y agoYou can make a shortcut that takes you right to the screen, but you still have to toggle the setting. It’s a half measure but reduces the frustration a little.
- orev 4y agoThis approach just doesn’t work when you have a significant number of outside parties and things to deal with. Doctors’ offices in particular often have calls coming from many different phone numbers and you just can’t rely on white listing them all. Once you get to an age where health issues happen more frequently than an annual checkup, it just doesn’t work.
- thewebcount 4y agoI'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. My spouse has a very severe and very expensive chronic illness, and has several doctors visits a month with different doctors. We have had no problem with our doctors reaching us via phone. (And it works way better than any of their "healthcare portals" where nurses actually read your messages and deem all of them non-urgent and don't respond.) We absolutely do have their numbers in our contacts so their calls come through. On those rare occasions when they call from some general number behind a call switch, they leave an appropriate voicemail and we call back. They are sometimes vague with the details on voicemail because they can't be sure who will listen to it, but we are always able to get back to them. FWIW, we're in our 50s and have very frequent health issues, so this is not unknown to me by any means.
- jnovek 4y agoI’m glad this works out for you, but your experience is not universal. I have a chronic condition I am stuck with a hospital system that seems to play PBX roulette. I have a dozen of their phone numbers white listed and still miss an important call coming from a new number from time to time. I hate it, it’s completely out of touch, but it’s not something I have any control over.
- brewdad 4y agoIf you are dealing with a doctor who won't leave a "This is Dr. So-and-so. Please call our office." voicemail, find a new doctor. Seriously.
- 4y ago
- subsubzero 4y agoThats what I do, if I don't know the number I have voicemail and if they don't leave a message I just block the number. I have thousands of blocked numbers, to be fair the phone experience in 2022 is just horrible due to the FCC and telcos not doing their job in regulating these criminals.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoI try to use voicemail. The reason it doesn't work is that although my phone has 128Gb of storage, for some reason my provider's voicemail system can only store like 10 seconds of audio before it runs out of space and asks me to delete messages. My landline's answering machine is like this too. Apparently there's a special kind of memory just for recording telephone messages and it's as precious as a diamond.
- MikePlacid 4y agoThe calls that I did not answer all go to https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ They’ll send email notification immediately after recording a voice message. (The main reason I’ve subscribed to Jolly Roger was to torture robocallers with roboanswers. They had a collection of rather hilarious conversations on their web page. In real life robocallers seem smarter now and drop much sooner, but voicemail feature works ok and I have not noticed any limits - messages are attached to emails and my gmail account is still at 5% or so. I was thinking of implementing the same idea with better technology, like on the fly voice recognition, which seems possible and should lead to tons of funny results, but I’m too lazy now).
- atkailash 4y ago
- SomeCallMeTim 4y agoCallers with blocked caller ID get screened by Google for me, and I rarely ever hear from them -- but I get a ton of calls from people who either have spoofed numbers or who have temporarily picked up a "source" number based in my area code. It's gotten to the point where if it's a local call I almost always assume it's spam, but I still need to answer. If it's a doctor's office trying to make an appointment, for instance, then getting through to the same person who knows why you're trying to make the appointment so you don't need to give them 100x as much information yet again? Yeah, at that point it's much better to just answer a few spam calls instead of ignoring all of the unfamiliar numbers. I have a kid in college and another in high school. A dead phone could mean I could be getting a call from one of them from any number. I just can't ignore them all. I'm happy for you that your life is simple enough that you can just ignore anything you don't recognize, but try not to act as if the rest of us are doing something wrong because we're happy that the FCC is attacking the underlying problem and ignoring the pain we need to deal with.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoYou can disable unknown callers? Which countries support this? I’m Australia, some government agencies hide caller ID, it’s incredibly frustrating.