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I have paid for and enabled automatic rejection of all Private Callers and Anonymous callers. I’ve been registered on the federal do not call list since 2003.
The custom call block Bellsouth offers only works with local numbers. Why? I would have to use a great many expletives involving mental retardation, anatomically incorrect head positions as well as unrealistic anus elasticity to explain it fully so I won’t.
Here are the kind of numbers Bellsouth does not allow me to block:
1- fake numbers:1-555-555-5555, 1-999-999-9999 and so on. 2- known out of area numbers: 1-212, 1-519, 1-323, etc. 3- unknown out of area numbers (I could pay bellsouth to block these) 4- Toll free numbers: 1-866, 1-800, 1-888 (they’re considered OOArea) 5- Wireless numbers.
I can’t cancel with Bellsouth because they don’t offer naked DSL and their DSL is the only game in town (local cable sucks too much and all DSL providers operate through bellsouth and they need me to have a bellsouth phoneline) so I need to keep my phone with them. Thank you Florida legislators!
I’ve done some research and the only thing I came up with was the Caller ID Manager. It’s a bit expensive ($100) and I can’t seem to find any reviews online about it.
***** legal action is not an option for me. In any case, it’s usually impossible to obtain the information necessary to sue these people (I’ve tried). Most of them are breaking the law one way or another and they know it.**
***** I also don’t want to change my phone number. Informing everybody who has it on file is a big hassle as you’ll understand**
Any advice would be appreciated. If you have used the Caller ID manager i mentionned earlier or some equivalent, let me know how it worked out for you please.
It sounds like you only have this line so that you can get DSL. Do you have a cell phone? You could make sure friends and people that you would expect a call from your cell phone number (basically, pretend like you don’t have a POTS line) and just unplug your landline phone.
A fair suggestion but not an ideal one in my particular case.
I use a pre-paid cellphone plan (for financial reasons) and I get charged 20c/min whether I’m calling or getting called.
I also try to give my cell number as rarely as possible because, unfortunately, I can start getting junk calls on it too (it’s happened to me a handful of times before). That would be much worse than my current situation. Also, some entities have no business disturbing me if I’m out, busy doing stuff. I’d rather they only have my homephone so I can just check the messages when I come back home.
I use Call Soft, which can be programmed to simply hang up on a number that is in its phone book, or what I like to do is have it answer, then play a wav file (included with the program) of the phone company lady sayiing, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.” Then it hangs up.
Call Soft is only $29, and you can download a trial version before you buy. It does require a compatible modem, not all modems will support it.
Yeah, software solutions are by far the best, offering an essentially unlimited amount of features. Unfortunately, I would have to buy a dialup modem and wouldn’t receive calls whenever my computer is turned off or there is a power outage. I’d also need to stay by the computer to answer my calls.
This would probably work well in an office setting, not so great for a home.
Uh its about as much as a lightbulb under most circumstances, unless you have 4 hard drives, a quad core cpu and dual 1G SLI video cards, you have little to worry about. machines can also be set to power down some but not all components and wake on certain types of activity.
I actually do have 4 HDs, dual core opteron @ 2.2 Ghz (95W), A 112W gpu. The suspend feature sometimes never lets me wake up the pc and the AMD Cool’n’quiet drivers simply crash XP on startup (Bios settings are correct and the feature is enabled).