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No, Your Phone Didn’t Ring. So Why Voice Mail from a Telemarketer?

posted by mrpg on Monday June 05 2017, @01:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-call-is-important-to-us dept.

"exec" writes:

Original URL

Frank Kemp was working on his computer when his cellphone let out the sound of Mario — from Super Mario Bros. — collecting a coin. That signaled he had a new voice mail message, yet his phone had never rung.

"At first, I thought I was crazy," said Mr. Kemp, a video editor in Dover, Del. "When I checked my voice mail, it made me really angry. It was literally a telemarketing voice mail to try to sell telemarketing systems."

Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses. The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them.

Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.

But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers' voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother's nursing home or a child's school.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday June 06 2017, @12:54PM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday June 06 2017, @12:54PM (#521291) Journal
    Why does anyone enable voicemail anymore? Answerphones made sense in the '80s and early '90s before SMS and email. Now, if someone wants to send me something non-urgent, they can send it in email or SMS where things like copy-and-paste work so that if there's anything important I can deal with it easily and not have to replay it multiple times to catch a number that someone mumbled. If something is urgent, my phone rings and I might answer it. Voicemail combines the worst aspects of telephone and email. It's the first thing I disable when I move to a new mobile phone provider. Oh, and it also reduces the number of rings I have to answer, so increases my number of missed calls significantly simply by existing.
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  • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:16AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:16AM (#521714)

    The main purpose of voicemail nowadays is a way of screening my calls. If I don't recognize your number you go to voicemail. If you leave a nice message I'll decide whether I want to call you back. 95%+ of spam calls don't leave a voicemail. Admittedly the ones that do are annoying as hell.

    Of course, if they would fix the goddamn spam call problem so that if my phone rings, it's actually someone I would want to talk to, then maybe I'd disable the voicemail.

  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:54PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:54PM (#521866) Journal

    It's hard to compose SMS or email on a cell phone with only a 10-key keypad, not a touch screen or a QWERTY keyboard. And forget about it on a payphone or other landline.