Contact block on pureos in librem5

That’s what I had on my old Sony Ericsson phone !

I’m a little baffled by that not being a thing anymore, especially these days.

Some white-list would be also nice for some do-not-disturb mode.
(= Only some contacts can disturb me.)

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I’ll bring up this topic, because it’s really an important one, i think this feature should be prioritized to allow to block specified numbers and also prefix with wildcards, since spam it’s a thing

Could someone do something about it from purism or from community?

So, I’ve been noticing more and more spam calls/messages sending false number information.

Is there no way to verify the number being sent to your phone is actually the number you’re being called from?

I know there are legitimate uses for faking your number (such as all the business lines giving out the same number so that you only have to know one number for a business even though they have multiple lines) but this does make the anti-spam portion of this a bit more challenging.

I think the most common call people want to block are from well defined number, unknown number and foreign spam number, for thw defined number just add this contact on a block list is enough same to reject unknown incoming call ( but we need those options) for foreign spam number a wildcard spam filter will be enough i.e. if i want to deny all incoming calls coming from england i will add +44* to the spam filter and that’s it. Will be trivial for other random numbers from your own country, but i’ll be happy too have the 3 easiest example i made on librem5.
I think it’s a must on a privacy wise phone, any word on this @nicole.faerber ? I think this is a must too for all women who suffer from stalking

I did read something about a semi recent or impending change in US law… that will allow the cell providers to offer call screening… but they also have the right to charge for it. (Not to mention that by signing up, we probably sign away yet more rights). I can’t recall the specifics tho.

I bet some folks will develop software features to augment the ?dialer? For custom do not disturb… or “only allow calls from Favorites”

Any blocker that simply sends the caller to voicemail is worthless, as you then have to fish the garbage out of your voicemail.

In some cases, they actually WANT to leave you a voicemail.

I’d love a button that simply disconnects the call.

Alas such is probably not legal.

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There should be a way to divert unwanted calls into abyss :slight_smile:
I used to do that with my old Sony Ericsson phone. I would choose the non existing number and forward certain calls to it. There was a white list, black list and it was allowed to select “number starting with” , where I could put area codes only (i.e. 800, 866 etc).
There has to be a way for better phone screening than we have nowadays

There are some that just straight up block robocalls. If nothing else, the phone could connect and immediately hang up.

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That would make things worse for you. We were getting the same number of spam calls on average - few a day, but since my wife picked up and hung up immediately, her phone’s been bombarded compared to mine. May be anectodal , but that’s something that Consumer Reports reported on too.

That actually makes sense and confirms a hypothesis I had about acknowledging to them that the number is actively used. I guess the best answer would be to play a recorded message saying the number wasn’t in service then.

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There’s no such option at the moment. An issue was opened long ago here:

Note the “helpwanted” tag in the issue. In other words, patches welcome :slight_smile:

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I hope we will get an official statement about it, i know they are really busy, but i think this feature must be considered fondamental, for a respecting phone made by a social purpose company, i mean, it’s about spam and stalkering, will be a shame if an android or ios will be a better choice to protect yourself from it, i hope @todd-weaver will care about it

You rang… :slight_smile: [/me searches for forum white-list options :slight_smile: ] (My forum time is extremely limited).

I consider this a very important issue; and something to offer in client (e.g. a free service controlled by the user on their device).

As @bob.ham wrote we desire to include filtering on incoming calls (and even messages). However, it has seen near zero investment (beyond the idea, ticket creation, and desire), and will come from community involvement, or have to wait until we can invest in the development of the feature (as well as a lot of other features, call-waiting, group messaging, camera, etc.).

The good news is the continued development of our core apps will be something we are investing in heavily. Every phone sold helps advance the cause, so thank you for the continued support and spreading the word wider.

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Given that picking up and hanging up immediately just encourages them (I only use it when I know the number is going to leave me a voicemail anyway), might I suggest a way to forward (without the caller being able to tell) a call to a number that has no voicemail set up at all (i.e., the caller will simply hear it ring forever). I’d want to be able to do that once my phone rings, as a last resort.

I normally simply ignore the call but that has two downsides: 1) My phone is effectively useless for anything else while the son of a bitch is trying to call me, 2) If they wait long enough, the voice mail picks up; some of the callers simply start their robotic spiel at that instant and the last half of their spiel ends up as a voicemail. (2a–some of them actually want to leave a voicemail and give you a callback number. However, THAT doesn’t last too long, because that’s all the government needs to go arrest the SOBs.)

If I could immediately send the call somewhere else (without the caller knowing it) and that place was a place where they could go blue in the face waiting for the phone pickup, that would be ideal–since there’s no way to send a bullet through the phone and have it come out through the caller’s equipment.

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This was covered in a different post. I do want to spend more time on call filtering…

Thank you for the reply i really appreciate, i’m happy that you consider it a very important feature, i understand the size of the company and you must choose what to do and what to postpone, my hope is to see this core feature to be developed and added asap

Thanks for the link, i read you would like to work on an app to do that and that’s really appreciated, i hope you could do it for the evergreen release, anyway please add a wildcard blacklist to be able to block i.e. regional spammer and robocalls

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From what I remember in the days of the dumb phones, rejected calls only got the “busy” sound - beeps and only if it rings all the way through it was routed to voicemail. Now, the phone treats rejected and unanswered calls just the same - sending to voicemail.
What I see as one of the “simplest” solutions for a starter is to have rejected calls forwarded to a number of choice and unanswered to voicemail.
Later , you can add lists and more options for different numbers.
From the software aspect it should be super easy. As I said earlier, my old Sony Ericsson had a lot of these options.