Believe it or not, there are still over 30 million landline users in the US. These landline users have historically had a hard time blocking robocalls. In fact, they are generally reliant on their carrier for whatever passes as a solution. Standard practice seems to be that landline carriers try to label bad guys on the caller id, like Verizon’s home phones do with “Potential Spam”. That’s helpful in knowing when to answer, but the phone still rings.
For the last four years, however, Panasonic has taken a different approach: building robocall blocking directly into their landline phones. In fact, they had various landline phones, like this one easily available at Costco, that has robocall blocking built-in. That is, this phone has a list of “worst of the worst” phone numbers built right into it for automatic blocking. That means, the worst behaving numbers in the US are completely unable to ring anyone with these phones. They just plug it in and the phone does the rest.
And guess where Panasonic gets their list of numbers to block? That’s right. From YouMail Protective Services, essentially using a portion of our embedded score list, available through our Score service. We’re super excited that our spam list has helped protect so many landline users, on top of the millions who have used YouMail on their mobile phones, and on top of the millions protected by all the other carriers that use us for in-network blocking.
It’s not a panacea. But if you’ve got a landline it’s a very reasonable way to have your phone ring a lot less.
