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Fighting non email spam

These may include snail mail spam, sneaker spam (sales / market droids calling at your door) phone spam (telemarketing), horizon spam (billboards).

Some countries have a central mandatory do not call list.

General

  1. Always try the find out who is bothering you.
  2. Call the chamber of commerce and find out who are on the board.
  3. Find out their home phone numbers.
  4. Call one or two board members at home and tell them what you think about the whole lot. As it turns out, giving these thugs a taste of their own medicine has proven to be very very effective indeed.
  5. If possible, be buzzword compliant in your criticism. That way you're much more effective in actually getting through to these morons.

Phone spam

Some countries have a central mandatory do not call list.

  1. Get a Caller ID (CLIP) display.
  2. Do not answer calls without a CLIP.
    Some number displays will disconnect your phone if there's no number. So, if you can't identify who's calling you, your phones won't even ring!
    Some telcos provide ACR (Anonymous Call Reject), which does the same.
  3. If possible, try to hook up your CLIP to some sort of database system displaying the name and address of the caller. Sometimes this info can be obtained from a reverse directory website.
  4. Do not answer calls from commercial entities unless you have reason to believe that they won't bother you with pointless drivel. For instance because you asked them to call you.
  5. You could have all anonymous calls answered by a fax / modem.
    Eg; Start minicom and type ATA <Return> whenever you receive an anonymous call.

The shell script below starts minicom with a script; 

#!/bin/bash
exec minicom -c on -S "/home/rob/bin/pd.scr" modem

'modem' is a the config file used.

Below pd.scr. 'OK' is the modem's response to the reset string. '! killall minicom' kills minicom after the script has run. 

expect {
	"OK"
}
print "\r"
send "ATA\r"
expect {
	"NO CARRIER"
}
! killall minicom

Asterisk VoIP

See:

Horizon spam

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