Ooma Forums

In the last three days, I have received 8 calls that were picked up by my home answering machine with no voice mail left by the caller. I have the home answering machine set to pickup ahead of Ooma simply because it's more convenient to retrieve messages from the answering machine. (When we travel, I reverse the priority and have Ooma answer first so we can retrieve messages from almost anywhere.) I checked the Nomorobo web site and all 8 of these incoming numbers are listed there as robocallers. I have Premier with Nomorobo enabled. Why do these robocalls ring through to our answering machine, which picks up after 4 rings? I have the expectation Premier/Nomorobo should catch and block callers already on the robocaller list in that amount of time.

You need to check the 'Date Blocked' field to determine when a # was 1st reported to NMR & added to their database. Ooma doesn't use the NMR database 'live', but imports it once a week, "early Monday AM". Anything added to the NMR db after Monday's import won't be blocked until the next import.

That explains a great deal. Thanks so much for the information.

After thinking about this a bit more, I think that setup offers minimal protection. A robocall on Monday afternoon goes to voicemail, and, although no message is left, the call is answered. The caller then knows the number is a live line and can sell or otherwise distribute that information to countless other robocallers, each having different unblocked numbers and each making even more calls to my number as many as six days before the first caller is ever blocked.

It's kind of like Alice in Wonderland: the faster I go, the more behind I get. Don't see how this system with a built in lag time can stay ahead of the callers.

This is how I use the current system:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21374#p141445

I now get ~2-3 spam calls every few weeks, but the frequency varies throughout the year. YMMV

Nice post by you at the link provided. Thanks.

When I signed up for Premier a year ago with the $60 promo, my robocalls dropped from 2-3/day to 2-3/week. I was pretty happy with that for $5 a month. I got an email from my CC today showing the Premier renewal of $120 (no warning email from Ooma) and now I'm wondering if it's worth twice the cost. I may call Ooma and ask if I can cancel and get a refund. I would like to see if the robocall volume will jump back to where it was pre-Premier. One thing that bothers me about Nomorobo is that it has directed legitimate calls (from my doctor's office for example) into voicemail. That's kind of annoying.

IF you create a NMR acc't, not only can you report "A robocall that wasn't blocked", you can also report "A valid number that was blocked incorrectly".

Alternatively, send blocked calls, which don't show up in logs, to VM w/ email notification... # shows up in Subject line. Add "good" #s your contact list, which acts as a whitelist.

The blocked number was in my contacts and it was blocked a 2nd time, even after I reported it to NMR. I finally figured out what was happening. The doctor's office is part of a large medical group. When they call me, the main # of the group shows up, not the number of their office. It was the same area code & first 3 digits as the doctor's office. I added that to my contacts and that seemed to solve the problem. I did not know about the VM w/email notification setting. That's good to know.

It's the only reliable way I've found to deal w/ that sort of erroneously blocked call.

Note that (in my experience) junk calls rarely leave a msg, so shunting blocked calls to VM hasn't had much of a negative impact.