Call Protect - Management of 1572 Junk Voicemail

[#1]

If a junk call has been intercepted and recorded in Junk Voicemail, does the phone dial tone "warble", identically to normal voicemail? I hope that the answer is "no", that there is either no notification or there is a different notification sound. Having been spared the inconvenience of answering the junk call, I don't want to find that it takes a longer time to stop the system reminding me about it.

If I simply ignore the recorded junk messages, are they deleted automatically? After how long?

Personally, I wish there was an option to select "just block all junk calls" rather than recording them. It seems bizarre to have a central list of known problem numbers, but to allow them to keep making calls and to record all of those calls.

[#2]

Hi @MinusNet,

Thanks for getting in touch.The dial tone will sound the same for the junk mailbox as the standard mailbox and up to 20 junk voicemails can be stored at a time and when the limit is reached the newest message will delete the oldest message. There isn't any time limit on how long the junk voicemails will stay in the mailbox, but if you ignore all of the junk voicemails they will start to delete themselves with every new junk voicemail that comes through after the mailbox has reached it's limit.

I hope this helps, but if you have any further questions please don't hesitate to let us know.

[#3]

Thanks for the detail, though it's not what I wanted to hear.

So:

• without Call Protect, we just listen to a few seconds of nonsense, then hang up. If we have a warbling dial tone we know to dial 1571 for a message that we (probably) want.
• with Call Protect, we are not disturbed by the junk call but when we next pick up the phone we hear a warbling dial tone and don't know whether to dial 1571 or 1572. Probably we try 1571 first, then 1572 if necessary. I can imagine this taking as long, and being as frustrating, as answering the junk call in the first place.

Thanks anyway, but I think I will wait for an improved solution.

[#4]

Hello @MinusNet

Thank you for your feedback, it is a really good idea to have separate tones for the mail boxes and would make the feature a lot better. I have passed this on to the relevant team to look into.

[#5]

What is being proposed here is to change the dialling tones on all phone lines ... which is likely to cause untold difficulties for autodial devices which know what a dialling tone sounds like ... before attempting to dial.

Whilst individuals might take the stance that THEY do not have auto diallers many people, particularly the vulnerable, do ... and whilst implementing a third dial tone might benefit some, it will adversely impact those reliant on auto diallers.

Allowing "presumed to be junk callers" to leave a message, facilitates the possibility that an important caller is simply not recognised (for whatever reason) and not be entirely inhibited from leaving a contact message.

Recently a friend with Talk Talk had call protect imposed on them (TT's way of rolling it out) and found that they were getting repeated calls from an unrecognised "Fred" ... and so did not answer them.  In the meantime they were desperately awaiting contact from a specialist support group for her husband.  In frustration she contacted the organisation, only to be told that "Fred" had been trying to contact them for weeks ... but had received no response to the many messages left.  Note that the nature of the group forbade saying there "Fred" was from.

Call protect is I think over kill - a solution looking for a problem - for I see nothing wrong or difficult with just answering the phone and simply saying "No thank you and hanging up".  We are all too prone to expecting technology to fix things which are not broken and then being disappointed by the limitations of the "solution".

[#6]

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@Townman wrote:

Call protect is I think over kill - a solution looking for a problem - for I see nothing wrong or difficult with just answering the phone and simply saying "No thank you and hanging up".  We are all too prone to expecting technology to fix things which are not broken and then being disappointed by the limitations of the "solution".

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Clearly you are not troubled by nuisance calls to the extent that other users are.  I'm very happy for you 

[#7]

@Bob-a-Job,

A warm welcome to the forums - thank you for your good wishes.  I get enough unsolicited calls thanks, but considering them to be a nuisance is the first step of negative thinking.

They might well be a call which I did not ask for, from someone trying to do "their job" be that a good job or a bad job.  How each of us chose to respond to that, is a choice we can control.  These days people chose to get hot under the collar over far too many trivial matters ... then seek technological (limited) solutions to mitigate things which are not that much of a hill of beans and they then get even hotter under the collar when the limitations of said technology are not 100% effective.

For the sake of our wellbeing sometimes we need to look at the "issues" differently.  For a start be very circumspect over who you share your phone number with.

[#8]

Thank you for your warm welcome. You seem to believe that unsolicited calls are trivial, which for you may well be the case. Please do not expect the rest of humanity to perform with the same logic; calm resolve and good grace that you evidently do.  Some customers are not able to identify scams or handle pushy salespeople and are troubled by repeated silent calls.  Sadly my experience is that the issue cannot be controlled by being 'very circumspect over who you share your phone number with'; being ex-directory or by registering with TPS. 

That is why some of us seek to encourage our telecoms service provider to improve their Call Protect feature. In that way vulnerable family members can avoid the stress and upset of unsolicited nuisance calls.

[#9]

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@TheMightyAJ wrote:
The dial tone will sound the same for the junk mailbox as the standard mailbox

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@MinusNet wrote:

Thanks for the detail, though it's not what I wanted to hear.

So:

• without Call Protect, we just listen to a few seconds of nonsense, then hang up. If we have a warbling dial tone we know to dial 1571 for a message that we (probably) want.
• with Call Protect, we are not disturbed by the junk call but when we next pick up the phone we hear a warbling dial tone and don't know whether to dial 1571 or 1572. Probably we try 1571 first, then 1572 if necessary. I can imagine this taking as long, and being as frustrating, as answering the junk call in the first place.

Thanks anyway, but I think I will wait for an improved solution.

I'd just like to make a correction to this which hopefully will be some good news for you.

Call protect (1572) doesn't interrupt the dial tone when you have junk voicemail.

Apologies for previous response and the discussion it's lead on to. Hopefully you'll now be open to implementing this on your account and I imagine it will help out cutting down the spam phone calls you're receiving, if not immediately if/when implementing a block on withheld/number unknown calls, then at least when adding numbers to the block list over time