Blacklisting is USELESS!

[lbmofo]

http://primus.ca/popups/en/HP_FeaturesGCC.html
http://www.primustel.ca/en/residential/ ... Guard.html
http://www.primustel.ca/en/residential/ ... lGuide.pdf

Would the above be it?

Looks like "Call Screening" is blacklist with one treatment option, don't ring my phone with max of 12 entries.
Looks like "Privacy Guard" is fancier version of Anonymous Call block.
Looks like "Telemarketing Guard" is what you were telling us about. To me it looks like Community blacklist with exceptions and personal list to append. I am surprised that they would allow 250+ entries on this personal addendum list when they only allow 12 for "Call Screening."

Looking at the links, configuration is all by phone. This means all lists add/delete are done via 10 digit phone numbers.

You are saying if you log in to their GUI, you can add to lists and do wildcards while adding to "Telemarketing Guard" both number and callerid name with wildcard? Wow.

[lbmofo]

Looking at it some more, call screening and treatment option for Primus seems to have increased to 50 entries.
If web portal, you can specify wildcard to block area codes. But no callerid name wildcard.

http://resisupport.primus.ca/en/tbb/189 ... eenforward
http://resisupport.primus.ca/en/tbb/63-mytbb-incoming

Couldn't find anything on Telemarketing Guard and how web portal configuration is like.

Primus' inbound call management system is LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than OOMA.

I don't see it. They don't have whitelist, just community blacklist exception and personal addendum. How would this alleviate some folks bombarded with spam calls. With incoming treatment limited to 50 and callerid number wildcard....seems lacking compared to Ooma.

[slantyyz]

Their documentation may not be up to date. The concierge is basically a rules engine. If you assert a positive rule (i.e. a full number like 123-456-7890 but have a separate rule that blocks 123*), it behaves like a whitelist and lets in the rule with the full number. Before I figured out the whitelisting on Primus, I had a ton of blacklist rules, I thought it was more than 50, but based on your links, that might be misremembering. I was blocking all sorts of combinations and permutations up to the 5th or higher digit (1-647-28*).

You can nitpick my memory on some of the details as I have been off Primus for some time, but my bottom-line experience with the blocking was much more positive than Ooma. Once I figured out how to whitelist on Primus, I set it up once with only a handful of entries and --never-- touched it again.

Compare that with Ooma. I'm updating my Ooma blacklist --every few days--. I looked at my call log, and about 80% of new calls use number patterns similar to my contacts. It's not just about blocking area codes. If my phone number starts with 647-925-5...., I have to block out 647-925-[1*,2*,3*,4*,6*,7*,8*,9*,0*] I live in a metropolitan area with 4 area codes and around 4 million people. All the telemarketers are using very common local exchanges, I'd have to do A LOT of blacklist entries just to simulate what Primus' concierge did for me.

The only reason why I'm still on Ooma is that it doesn't drop connections in the middle of a call the way Primus did. Having said that, the latency seems worse on Ooma than Primus, and Ooma's audio gain is a little high.

Ooma's blacklist is as bad as the iPhone's call blocking, which does what you tell it to, but makes you work at it.

Making your customers work at managing their blacklist when a simpler, relatively easy to implement solution (whitelist type of functionality) exists is a user experience anti-pattern.

[slantyyz]

With incoming treatment limited to 50 and callerid number wildcard....seems lacking compared to Ooma.

Ok just to be more specific how my setup worked on Primus.

There is something called a Default Call Treatment - it is applied to -all- numbers regardless of caller ID. I set it to "Send to Voicemail"
Afterwards, I added only my contacts (friends, doctors offices, etc) as call treatments that allowed the phone to ring, or forward/follow-me to a cell number. Those rules supercede the default call treatment in very much the same way as a whitelist, short of officially being called a whitelist.

That's it. I had less than 20 rules in my concierge.

Looking at my Ooma blacklist, I have 41 entries and counting. Only a handful are for blocking area codes, the rest are trying to handle wildcard blocking near the last digits (i.e. 647-123-5*,647-123-6*, etc.) because I have to get down to that level of specificity so as not to block specific numbers that I want to come in. This is because I have had some telemarketer numbers match my contact phone numbers on the first 7 or 8 of 10 digits.

Ooma already has a "contacts" list. I don't know why they can't just do "If incoming # is not in contacts, apply blacklist rules" and let you have a blacklist rule that is only a single character wildcard (*) which would send all remaining numbers to voicemail or some other limbo.

[lbmofo]

slantyyz, whitelist is nice. Being able to specify default call treatment to block all and then specify exception is nice.

Even Uverse offers blacklisting & whitelisting (one or the other in use); both limited to 20 entries of phone numbers.

I proposed Ooma to implement a whitelist feature as well. My proposed implementation suggested one or the other approach as well ("Whitelist and/or PIN Privacy" OR "Blacklists with Contacts Exception Option"). But if one can block all incoming calls with personal blacklist (contacts exception = whitelist), the 2 modules could be combined/integrated with PIN privacy at the very end of the flow. One thing I realized later is that personal blacklist get processed first (my flow is wrong). My guess is personal, expanded (nomorobo), then community is the order.

/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15620&start=10#p109485

[Telo_BK]

To cover most of invalid area codes, you'd need 10+ wildcard entries. If one is inundated with spam calls, use the tools already available with Ooma Premier. Do something about it now. You have the power.

Enable Community Blacklist.
Enable Expanded Blacklist.
Enable Personal Blacklist and use wildcard entries.

Within personal blacklist:

Block all toll free numbers if you want via a few entries.
Block invalid area code numbers 10+ entries to cover most.
Consolidate explicit entries collected over time to block entire offending area codes.
Consolidate explicit entries collected over time to block area code + prefix + 1 more digit for local and neighboring area codes.

Having enabled ALL the blacklists quite some time ago (almost two years), and adding wildcard entries, I will make my point more clearly: Blacklisting is useless. I still get lots of garbage calls. Could I do more? Sure. Have I done alot already to help myself? Certainly.

There are nine invalid area codes that begin with "52". There are currenty about 390 valid area codes, of the 1000 that are numerically possible (so less than half are valid). I will ask again: How many (exactly) entries would EVERY Ooma subscriber have to enter to block all invalid area codes? How many more entries would EACH Ooma subscriber have to make to block every invalid exchange (CO code) within each valid area code?

Why won't Ooma save EVERY customer the time, and make it actually possible (256 entries is more than THREE orders of magnitude too few) to block scam calls from invalid numbers by refusing to route those calls from invaild numbers? Why, after more than six years of requests, will they not add blacklisting by name? Why no whitelisting? The current tools are so inadquate for many of us, that they are virtually useless!

slantyyz has pointed out that this ability already exists for the subscriber's of at least one other carrier. And the evidence shows that AT&T, Verizon, and COX at the very least are doing a more effective job. If you want to say Ooma's cheaper, I will agree. Evidently you get what you pay for. But Ooma should provide a big disclaimer for "Stop unwanted callers by blocking numbers or sending them directly to voicemail.".

[Telo_BK]

In the last 4 or 5 days, I have gotten far fewer junk calls. This isn't due to anything new that I have done. Not sure why (we've gone through lulls before). If this changes, I will report back. What a difference from as many as seven junk calls in a day a week ago!

[TheOldGrouch]

Are these blocked calls supposed to have some sort if indication that they have been blocked on the call logs? If they are, I'm not seeing it.

[oomamaniacal]

Not yet. Stay tuned.

[Telo_BK]

Today I got a voicemail from a number on my personal blacklist. The number is "367-3345", and the Caller Name is: "3673345". Since there's no area code, they get through Ooma's blocking, it appears. The same number called a couple of weeks ago and got through.

This number displays as blocked in my call log (circle with bar), so why can they leave a voice message?