said by MartinM
Is there a reason why you want to filter spam a phone book? Wouldn't a import feature in the filtering section be a cleaner solution? I can understand the appeal of a phone book group to apply filtering rules such as time conditions, ivr etc but for spam, not sure, unless there's something I am missing? If you could "enlighten me" that would be great Thanks
:
It's mostly a matter of elegance. Right now, for example, I have about 20 different filters -- the majority of which are individual spam entries. When I get a telemarketing call, or a persistent mis-dial, I add a new filter sending it to a "No Service" message.
What would be easier, at least in my view, would be to have a filter that operated on a "Spam" group in my Phone Book. Then, you just have to add the number to the group, and voila -- instant filtering.
I understand that some may see this as cluttering up their Phone Book, which I think is an understandable objection. But I can also see the benefit of filtering groups in other contexts. For example, you could have a "Close friends" or "Work" group with a set of numbers, and operate a filter based on that (e.g., calls from numbers in the work group go to voicemail after 5:00PM).
I guess the bottom line is that, in my personal work-flow, I see the spam filtering aspect as a by-product of a useful feature (like you mentioned -- time conditions for groups of numbers, etc.) I think a group feature in the phone book (independently useful for sorting large phone books) and the ability to filter on groups (useful for many things, one of which is spam filtering).
Alternatively, I could see the benefit of a specific SPAM blacklisting feature. This could be implemented via the web portal (add a number, it gets blacklisted on your account) and/or through star-codes (*XX adds last inbound caller ID to the blacklist). Long-term, and I'm sure much more complicated, this could be used to start building some sort of system-wide grey-listing ability, with users having the option of filtering (e.g., to voicemail) caller ID's that have been reported as SPAMy by other Voip.ms users.
That got really long, sorry about that! Just some ideas for future features that would improve my workflow, and possibly others.