Answering machine and voicemail settings that put off bad callers: four sample calls

I will start with the shortest call I know of: four seconds, nobody speaking. That call, and three others, make up the rest of this page. They are the exchanges that tell you whether your answering machine or voicemail settings are doing their job, and I have written each one out with notes on the lines that matter.

All four exchanges below are invented for illustration. They are composites of the kinds of calls home phones receive. No real person, number or company is described.

Exchange 1: the recording nobody speaks to

[Phone rings six times. The machine picks up.]
1  Machine:  "You have reached this number. Please leave a message."
2  [Beep. Two seconds of silence. Click.]

Before line 1. Six rings is the interesting part. Somebody who was ringing for a reason has waited through all of them, while some automated dialers give up sooner. You also had six rings to read the screen. If the number was one you did not know and the name looked like a chopped business, nothing obliged you to hurry across the room.

Line 1. This greeting gives a stranger nothing: no name, no address, no word about being away. That is the point. A greeting that announces "we are on vacation until the 20th" is an invitation to the wrong sort of caller, and one that says you live alone is worse.

Line 2. The silence and the click are the usual shape of an automated dialer that was built to connect to a live voice and gives up on a recording. That is a pattern and not a rule, and some robocalls do leave messages. Still, voicemail has turned an interruption into a line in a log, and you decided when to look at it.

The setting behind it. The rings-before-answering number. A higher number gives you time to reach the phone and check the caller ID, and a lower one sends calls to the recording sooner. For a house that screens, I would choose a middle value: long enough to decide, short enough that a real caller has not given up. Where the setting lives varies by device and by carrier, so use the manual for a machine and your provider's help page for network voicemail.

Exchange 2: a message worth returning

[Phone rings, goes to voicemail. Recorded message.]
1  Caller:  "Hello, this is a pharmacy calling for Helen about a
             refill that is ready. We are open until seven."
2  Caller:  "If you have questions, call the number on your bottle."

Line 1. A person with a real reason says so after the beep. This message names a specific thing you might expect, creates no pressure and asks for nothing.

Between the lines. Keep a message like this for a day, not forever. Once the refill is collected, delete it, so the memory has room and the next message is the one you see first.

Line 2. The caller sent you to a number you already hold. That is the safe pattern, and it is the one to copy even when the message looks good: look up the organization's official number on its website or on a statement you already have, and call that instead of any number given in a message.

Exchange 3: a message to delete

[Phone rings, goes to voicemail. A flat recorded voice starts after a half-second gap.]
1  Voice:  "This is an important notice about your account."
2  Voice:  "A charge of four hundred dollars was placed on an order
            you did not make."
3  Voice:  "Press one now to speak with an agent, or call us back."

Line 1. No name of any organization, no detail you could check. "Your account" could mean anything, and that vagueness is what a mass dialer needs.

Line 2. An order you did not place, a charge you did not authorize. It claims a problem with an account you may not even have, and it wants you alarmed.

Line 3. Press a key, call back, act now. Never call the number given in a message like this, and do not press anything on a live call that offers the same choice. Delete it. If you want to report it, write down the date, the time, the number and what was said, and send it to ReportFraud.ftc.gov. If a callback number came with an unfamiliar area code, the number reader will tell you its region and time zone, though it cannot tell you who owns the line.

If you want a second opinion. Play the message to someone else in the house before you decide. Scam scripts lean on pressure, and a second listener often hears that pressure more clearly than the person who was just startled by the call.

Exchange 4: screening through the speaker

[The machine plays the greeting. Its speaker is on. You are at the stove.]
1  Caller:  "Hi, it's Dana from next door. I think your gate is
             swinging open in the wind, so..."
2  You:     [lift the handset] "Dana, hang on, I'm here. Thank you."

Line 1. This is the old-fashioned version of caller ID. Keep the speaker on during the day and you hear the voice before you decide to pick up. A standalone machine usually has a screening switch or a volume dial for exactly this.

Line 2. You picked up because the voice was someone you know. The machine had done its job: no decision in two seconds, no politeness owed to a stranger.

The housekeeping behind it. If the machine has a message counter, glance at it before bed and delete what you have heard. A full machine stops recording, and a caller with a real reason gets a busy tone or a cut-off beep, which is a worse result than the nuisance you set out to avoid.

Why this one is the best of the four. No setting did the work here. The speaker, the plain greeting and a neighbor who knew to talk to the machine did. It costs nothing, and anyone in the house can do it.

Setting the machine up so these exchanges happen

Keep the greeting plain and neutral: "You have reached this number, please leave a message." Leave your name, address and schedule out of it. If your carrier's default greeting reads out your number, record your own. If you run both a machine and carrier voicemail, make sure only one of them answers, because two systems fighting over a call produce half-recorded messages and confused callers. Set the machine to pick up after fewer rings than the carrier, or switch the carrier service off, and test it by calling from your mobile.

Network voicemail from the carrier has one extra feature worth knowing: many plans light a lamp or play a tone on the handset when a message is waiting. Turn that on if you can, so a message that matters does not sit unheard for days. Check your provider's help page for where the option lives, and do not assume the same code works on another provider.

Voicemail does not replace blocking, but the two work well together. Blocking stops calls from numbers you have named, and voicemail handles everything else gently. If you want to add real blocking, begin with the glossary of landline blocking terms and tools. If hidden-number calls are your main trouble, anonymous call rejection is worth a look.

One last habit, and it is the one that matters most. The best setting is the one the whole household follows. If one person always picks up, the best machine in the world will not help. Agree on a rule, write it on a card and put it by the phone.