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Comment by russelldavis | Hacker News Reader

This approach comes pretty close to solving the problem, but a couple issues are dealbreakers for me:

1) It mutes all notifications, not just non-whitelisted calls. As much as I hate notification overload, I do want a select few to come through.

2) I want a discoverable way for non-whitelisted callers to be able to break through (not everyone will know to call multiple times to break through).

I'm working on an app that addresses those -- email me if you're interested (see my profile).

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We have POTS at home and work with a regular digital answerphone set to "speaker" ("always answer").

So, all calls get answered by the answerphone, most spam callers hangup as soon as the message starts.

Genuine callers start to give a message and you can pick up if you want to handle the call immediately. If someone needs to "break through" then they can say "hi, it's X, can you pick up please".

Works fantastically.

I would love my mobile to work the same way.

re #2: They can leave a voicemail; I'll listen to it and call back if necessary.

Going back and listening to voicemails of spam is more time consuming than just answering it at the time it comes in.

At the moment, the percentage of spam calls that bother to leave a message is low enough that it seems to work out. I also don't have to worry about the impoliteness of hanging up when it's a live human on the other end, and can time-shift the annoyance to when I'm not in the middle of something.

I wish I could ban the hundreds of 2-4 second voicemails I get a week. actually ban the number too.

Hmmm, as interrupting to answer at the time has the additional overhead of task/context switching, I'd say it's more.

If you just switch to/from the voicemail context once for 10 messages, the cost is only 10% of the cost for real-time answering.

Usually works well, but when you get caught in a cycle of always missing each other it sucks. Usually this is a business or similar where they call and are making a bunch of calls, so by the time I call back they are on the line with someone else.

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