cordless phone question

J

JOhnH

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Does anyone know of a cordless phone that will send all calls to voice mail unless the number is specifically "allowed". This would be the reverse of blocking specific calls. I would also like it to have a single "block" button that will prevent specific numbers from even going to voice mail.

The alternative would be to just get rid of the land line altogether, but we prefer not to go that route.
 
Thanks. I think that will do most of what I want. I don't think it will let me block a number as I listen to it in voice mail, but I could live with that.

The main reason I still use the land line is to give the number to all those stores and websites that require a phone number, but I don't really want them calling me. And I have had the same number for decades and periodically I get calls from friends I haven't heard from for years. If they leave a message, can either call them back or whitelist their number.
 
JOhnH said:
The main reason I still use the land line is to give the number to all those stores and websites that require a phone number, but I don't really want them calling me. And I have had the same number for decades and periodically I get calls from friends I haven't heard from for years. If they leave a message, can either call them back or whitelist their number.
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I use a free Google Voice number for that. Can set it to ring through to your cell or not, and just drop people into their VM. Their VM transcribes the call and e-mails it to you. Never have to answer it at all. Can also give it to sub-humans that you don’t quite trust.

Additionally if you have it ring through to your cell, it has a monitoring mode where you can listen to the caller leaving the VM and if it’s real, and you want to talk to them, you can hit a touch tone and interrupt and join the call. Otherwise they never know you were there or listening the whole time.

Various other Voip providers can also do all of the above if you’re anti-Google for whatever reasons you may have.
 
denverpilot said:
I use a free Google Voice number for that. Can set it to ring through to your cell or not, and just drop people into their VM. Their VM transcribes the call and e-mails it to you. Never have to answer it at all. Can also give it to sub-humans that you don’t quite trust.

Additionally if you have it ring through to your cell, it has a monitoring mode where you can listen to the caller leaving the VM and if it’s real, and you want to talk to them, you can hit a touch tone and interrupt and join the call. Otherwise they never know you were there or listening the whole time.

Various other Voip providers can also do all of the above if you’re anti-Google for whatever reasons you may have.
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MagicJack is another good option for a number to give people you don't especially want to hear from. I've been using it ever since the first model came out. The quality used to be horrid, but it didn't matter because I never answered it anyway. It wasn't even hooked up to a phone (or a computer in the first model, which used a softphone). It was a number to give to people and entities who demanded one, but to whom I had no intention of ever talking.

The latest MagicJack device, however, actually works quite decently, especially with proper QOS prioritization in the router. I have it hooked up to a phone now and use it pretty routinely for most calls other than to close friends and family.

One phone device I'd like to see would be one that asks the caller for a PIN code, and sends them to voice mail if they don't have one. It would be pretty easy to code using any computer with an old-school analog modem, but I'd like a self-contained one.

Rich
 
denverpilot said:
Various other Voip providers can also do all of the above if you’re anti-Google for whatever reasons you may have.
Click to expand...
I am "anti-Google", thanks to Rich, who I don't always agree with, but respect very much any way. While I may use some of their free tools, I refuse to create a Google account. I even switched all of my devices to use Duck Duck Go by default, instead of Google and have never regretted it.
 
I keep a "landline" (actually, VOIP) because Verizon's service at our house works sometimes and drops calls unexpectedly at others. Free long distance, so what the heck. Caller ID is helpful. I keep getting calls from "Anonymous" and sure as heck don't answer them.
 
JOhnH said:
I am "anti-Google", thanks to Rich, who I don't always agree with, but respect very much any way. While I may use some of their free tools, I refuse to create a Google account. I even switched all of my devices to use Duck Duck Go by default, instead of Google and have never regretted it.
Click to expand...

I could write a dissertation about all the things I hate about Google. Actually, I probably have if you add them all up.

One recent reason had to do with an idiot working for Google who couldn't grasp that a photo gallery on a client's site wasn't a "link farm". It's a standard photo gallery that uses thumbnails to open full-sized images. That should have been obvious even from the source code to anyone who knew anything at all about how HTML works. (He was unable to view the actual page in a browser, he said. He could only see the source code.)

It took a week of phone calls to and from this idiot and his equally-stupid supervisor before I finally worked my way up to someone who actually viewed the page in a browser and discovered that, lo and behold, it was a photo gallery. And the only reason I was even able to do that was because the client has paid Google > $1,000,000 in ad fees over the years. Otherwise, they wouldn't have even talked to me.

There's this popular notion that people who work for Google are some kind of geniuses. My experience has been the opposite. The biggest idiots I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with have all worked for Google. I mean, I'm talking about people so stupid that you wonder how they dress themselves in the morning.

I also had the displeasure of visiting YouTube earlier today (something I avoid if I possibly can), and found that their latest scheme to annoy people is to interrupt videos while they're playing with ads that can't be closed, and then try to get you to pay a fee to get YouTube ad-free.

Okay, I get that ad blockers have killed the free Web. That's not Google's fault. Too many freeloaders never stopped to think that if no one's paying for the content, the content will eventually disappear. But I don't use ad blockers, so the ads were rendering just fine. If the frigging ads are rendering, give me the courtesy of letting me watch the blasted video without not only an intrusive ad, but a sales pitch for a way to make the intrusive ads go away.

I hate Google.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
There's this popular notion that people who work for Google are some kind of geniuses. My experience has been the opposite. The biggest idiots I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with have all worked for Google. I mean, I'm talking about people so stupid that you wonder how they dress themselves in the morning.

I also had the displeasure of visiting YouTube earlier today (something I avoid if I possibly can), and found that their latest scheme to annoy people is to interrupt videos while they're playing with ads that can't be closed, and then try to get you to pay a fee to get YouTube ad-free.

Okay, I get that ad blockers have killed the free Web. That's not Google's fault. Too many freeloaders never stopped to think that if no one's paying for the content, the content will eventually disappear. But I don't use ad blockers, so the ads were rendering just fine. If the frigging ads are rendering, give me the courtesy of letting me watch the blasted video without not only an intrusive ad, but a sales pitch for a way to make the intrusive ads go away.
Click to expand...

We don’t do $1M a year with them, but it’s considerable. Just confirming I’ve never run into anyone at Google who knows what they’re doing, or understands our business before offering me services I not only don’t need.

Their other internal massive problem is their business units are completely siloed from each other. God forbid you ever have s problem the overlaps two business units. They can’t communicate at all.
 
denverpilot said:
We don’t do $1M a year with them, but it’s considerable. Just confirming I’ve never run into anyone at Google who knows what they’re doing, or understands our business before offering me services I not only don’t need.

Their other internal massive problem is their business units are completely siloed from each other. God forbid you ever have s problem the overlaps two business units. They can’t communicate at all.
Click to expand...

It wasn't $1M / year, but > $1M over the several years that he'd been paying for AdWords (which he's now drastically cut in favor of MSN / Yahoo / DuckDuckGo ads, which deliver less overall traffic, but at much lower CPC and with slightly better conversion).

I also found the isolation of departments infuriating. The whole ordeal started when a Google robot in the department that deals with Mobile Indexing provided a report that advised stripping the metadata from the thumbnail images to reduce their file sizes, thus speeding up page loads and reducing data use on mobile devices. But stripping the metadata from the images raised the eyebrows of the robot in Search Quality, who figured we must be trying to hide something and labeled the galleries as "malware." That in turn caused a robot in the Adwords department to reject ads that landed on those pages.

So basically, the whole problem boiled down to three robots with different and conflicting agendas; and to their humans, who were clueless regarding how to reconcile them.

Rich
 
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RJM62 said:
There's this popular notion that people who work for Google are some kind of geniuses.
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My client (can't say who) is also reputed to be nothing but geniuses and they don't understand that short pants are for children and/or weekends.

They also don't seem to know the first ****ing thing about the application they are working on.

In fairness, I don't work with the group doing the actual super cool smart people stuff. But they all seem to have some contact high going on.
 
Ravioli said:
My client (can't say who) is also reputed to be nothing but geniuses and they don't understand that short pants are for children and/or weekends.
Click to expand...
Darn, are you saying I need to go buy some long pants?
 
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