Back in 2011, I switched from Vonage to VOIPo for one reason: call blocking. At that time, Vonage had no meaningful features and I was getting about a dozen spam calls a week. Fast forward 5 years, and I can easily get that amount in one day, sometimes in one hour. (Wife REALLY resistant to switching DIDs, and unclear whether that really would help that much in the long term.) And the spam is pretty vicious now, fake IRS agents, fake “going to arrest you now”, etc., often with a lot of profanity/vitriol when you don’t take the bait. While VOIPo call blocking was fine in 2011, now in 2017 it’s pretty dated and leaves me longing for a better solution.

I think my needs could be met if VOIPo let the user rank (priority list) the Incoming Call Routing rules, and optionally add an (are you human?) challenge (e.g., “Press 1 to continue”). And it’d really be nice to also have an option to require unknown callers to announce their names (a la Google Voice). As it stands now with tons of spam calls and without ranked rules, I have to resort to a catch-all ********** to send CID’d unknown callers (usually fake CIDs) to voicemail, which is a really BAD approach as that catch-all overrides any rules for blacklisting certain callers that should get disconnected and it blocks incoming calls from someone new (e.g., contractor, doctor, etc.) who I rather be covered by a “Press 1 to continue” screening option. For those not on the receiving end of a lot of spam, you should know that many/most spammers these days are just using destination area code plus random 7 digits -- rendering VOIPo’s Spam Filer (largely) useless.

Free/cheap PBX (e.g., Incredible PBX) has hit Raspberry Pi and it would seem to have the flexibility to implement most or all of the above screening features, especially valuable to me is the above caller challenge/announce feature. Emailing MP3 of voicemail is also nice feature of IPBX -- VOIPo WAVs don't render (natively) on iOS devices. I’m generally satisfied with VOIPo, so I’d like to stick with the service and fix my call screening woes. Question is, net of the TOS and multitude of Forum messages on PBX/Asterisk, will this generate a ton of hate, vitriol, termination, etc. from VOIPo? I certainly understand how PBX can be abused, but would seem to me that that abuse would show up rather quickly in outbound volume log. I’m at pretty low outbound volume (typically, << 1000 min/mo) and will remain at low volume, I’m just looking to REDUCE inbound volume as well. I’ve configured a test setup with Obi100 - IPBX - GoogleVoice and it seems to work OK. Before attempting that effort on VOIPo, I’d like a read on the current situation for, what I would specifically call, “PBX on residential line with PRETTY LOW VOLUME”. Can I try this, or should I just move on to another service come renewal time?