Ultimate Caller ID Screeners?

omasse asks: "I'm sick of telemarketing. Really sick. And since I'm in Canada, the new U.S. telemarketing law won't change a thing for me. The only easy solution is a technological one, and it ought to be fully transparent: No phone in my house should ring at all if it's an undesired call, and friends and family should not have to enter a 5-digit code to make them ring. To my knowledge, the only gadget that could do this is a sharp filter based on caller ID that I plug in my main phone drop. But Digitone's Caller ID Screener has been announced some time ago, there are no guarantees they'll meet their fall 2003 deadline, and I would prefer having a few products to chose from. There's been a discussion here once on a DIY home PBX system but that's way, way overkill for me. Could anyone tell me what are the ultimate Caller ID Screeners?"

Comments

Asterisk

[tzanger]

Asterisk can solve that for you. I am playing with it now. It can do different things based on the received CID and even do things like play the "disconnected line" tone sequence before passing the call to you if the CID is unknown.

Just a word of advise: Don't use Quicknet's cards -- the cards work fine but the asterisk developers seem to have something against them, almost forcing you to use Digium's FXO/FXS cards instead. The PhoneJack/LineJacks will work fine for a little while and then you'll get weird problems like oddball rings, CID not being passed through, DTMF not being passed through, all kinds of little issues that you'll have to restart asterisk or reload the modules to fix. The standard answer on #asterisk is "Use Digium cards instead." Right.

Telephone answering machine

[squiggleslash]

CLI (caller line identification, commonly but, as I'll explain, completely inaccurately and deceptively described as "Caller ID") is an answer to the wrong question. You want to know WHO is calling. CLI tells you what the phone number of the person is who's calling, or, for the more expensive variants, what the name of the person associated with the phone is. Neither tells you who. And blocking the number is done for many legitimate reasons, not just by telemarketers.

If you want to know WHO is calling, and be in a position to decide whether to pick up a call on the basis of the person calling, a telephone answering machine is the only option available. Record a message like "Hi, this is X, speak after the tone and if I'm in I'll pick up", and listen when the phone rings.

It is the technological answer. Unfortunately, as it has no LCD screen and doesn't require subscription to an amazing service that beeps FSK tones in between rings, it's also the most crude looking, and thus the easiest to overlook. Unlike CLI, it works, it's 100% foolproof, there is never a false positive or false negative. You're not at the mercy of the networks interconnecting, or the policies of the person whose phone is being used to call you. And, FWIW, you protect the privacy of both you and the caller calling you.

Try this:

[Dark Nexus]

http://www.the-cma.org/consumer/donotcall/dnc_serv ice.cfm

Certainly not legally binding, nor as extensive as the US Do-Not-Call list. I think this is what an earlier poster was referring to (though I could be wrong).

Alternately, just fake your death!

Number of Rings

[jonadab]

All you really want is to program your phone to ring silently the
first N rings, and _then_ start ringing on the N+1th ring. The
right value of N will effectively prevent telemarketers from ever
reaching you, period, but anyone who knows you can be told, "Just
let it ring about eight times", which is what anyone with a real
and urgent need to reach you will do anyway.

VoicePulse VoIP works here in the U.S.

[Rescate]

I use the features of voice-over-IP provider VoicePulse to accomplish what you are talking about. I know that you can't get VoicePulse in Canada, but maybe there are other VoIP providers there that I don't know about, who offer similar features. You sign up with them, and they send you a preconfigured Cisco ATA-186 to hook up to your broadband connection. You plug a telephone into the Cisco ATA to use it.

You can then set up anonymous call blocking so that callers without caller ID don't get through. You can optionally set it up to allow anonymous callers if they enter their phone number after prompted, which then gets sent to your caller ID as ??1234567890?? to indicate that the call was originally anonymous.

They also have "Telemarketer Block", which I assume is the same kind of thing the Telezapper does. I should probably turn it on, but I thought it might be annoying to callers.

You can also use their Do Not Disturb feature in combination with their Filter feature to send most callers immediately to voice mail, but allow your family to ring through. You do this by activating the Do Not Disturb feature, and then setting a filter for each family member's telephone number with the filter action set to "Always Ring" (the filter overrides the Do Not Disturb).

The filters are cool, you can set them up for individual callers with actions of "Always Forward", "Always Ring", "Always Voicemail", "Always Busy", or for the truly annoying, "Not In Service", which plays a "not in service" message. One final option they don't list in their promo materials, but appears on the Filter setup page when I am logged in to my account, is "Rejection Hotline". It supposedly plays a "humorous message provided by the Rejection Hotline." I haven't tried this option yet, so I don't know how lame it is, but I can guess...

check with your phone company

[Tumbleweed]

They may already have the service you want. Qwest (formerly U.S. West) has it - can't remember the name, but here's what it does.

You get the service, and anyone calling you gets a message saying press '1' to proceed as long as you're not a solicitor, etc.

The message only plays if the caller is calling during legally-approved telemarketing hours.

The message will not play for people you've programmed into the system to bypass it - so put your friends and family members phone numbers into the system, and they'll never get the message. And if they do, all they have to do is press 1 right away, anyway.

Very nice, very simple, about $7 per month if I remember correctly.

So, check with your phone company - they may already have the solution you're seeking (assuming we're not talking about a cellphone company - I haven't seen this solution from them, yet).

The secondary defense is Caller ID, of course. That way you can avoid those calls from Mom when you're just not in the goddamned mood to put up with nonsense. :)