Silent ring

I get a lot of spam calls to my iphone. Many per day. Probably because I route two different numbers to the same cell phone; my coaching number and my local number. My coaching number in particular is “out there” because it’s counter productive to try and keep a number private when you’re trying to market your business.

These are all spam calls:

I don’t want to leave my ringer off, because I don’t want to miss the few calls that occasionally come from people I actually want to hear from. For awhile I set my phone on “do not disturb” with an override for contacts. So my contacts could ring through and no one else could.

That worked sort of ok, except the “do not disturb” setting silenced my text messages. They wouldn’t “bing.” There wasn’t an override for my contacts for text messages, only for calls. So I would tell everyone, “I won’t hear it if you text me, you have to call.” Well, that worked about as well as you’re thinking it did. Who calls anymore when they can text?

One day I had an idea. I’d create a new ringtone of just silence! I’d set that as the default, and assign other ring tones to my contacts. I recorded my own music file of a few seconds of silence, and spent quite awhile trying to figure out how to download it into my phone app as a ringtone. I finally gave up.

So then I thought maybe I’d just try to find a quiet or non-noticeable ringtone through the itunes store. Then I discovered that the itunes store offers several versions of a ringtone that is just silence! So for $1.29 I bought one of them and assigned it in my settings as my default ring.

So far so good, but now I had a phone that only rang silently. The next step was to assign a non-silent ring to each of my contacts. I could not figure out how to do this as a bulk action, so it took awhile. But once it was done, I don’t have to do it again except if I’m entering a new contact.

When entering a new contact, I just need to remember to edit the ringtone while I’m at it. For example, for this one I set the ringtone to “bulletin” which is the ringtone I use for business contacts. Friends have a different ringtone, and so does family.

Now my phone only rings when someone in my contact list is calling. And I can tell from the ring whether it’s a friend or client or business calling.

I read recently that the phone companies have developed a new way to limit spam calls, and things do seem to improved a bit since last month. But I still get spam calls every day and I’m glad they no longer ring.