… or anyone else really, with a little trick to implement a black list and filter unwanted callers.

GoogleVoice (GV for short) is a great service (I won’t go into the details, but you can read up about it here), but it is unfortunately accessible only if you are in the USA.
Granted there is already plenty of documentation about how to circumvent this, but I’m not aware of any of those using Asterisk.

So this post will document how to sign up for a GV account as well as how to use it with Asterisk afterwards, in the prospect of using it if you are not in the USA.

In order to be able to sign up for GV, you need to meet 2 prerequisites :

1. You need to have a US IP address
2. You need to have a US phone number, which will be used to validate your GV account

Step 1 is left as an exercise to the reader (“Good luck ! I’m behind 7 proxies !” :D).

Step 2 is the one we’re going to describe here, as an example of what you can pull with simple Asterisk configurations.

If like me you get tons of telemarketers calls, there’s an easy way to get rid of them with a quick Asterisk hack. The following Asterisk configuration snippet will immediately send any hidden caller ID (99% telemarketers, and I have a general policy of not picking up the phone for hidden caller ID anyway) to a holding music making them waste money and time…

Asterisk is a free telephony software. I’m posting here sample commented configuration files for reference purposes, hoping they will help you get kickstarted if needed.

This config sets up :

• SIP phones (for softphones or harware phones with SIP capabilities)
• Voice mails
• A few test phone numbers
• Forwarding of calls to a SIP provider for outbound and incoming calls (from/to PSTN)

That should be plenty already for a SOHO environment !

Note to French readers : Si votre FAI est Free, cette configuration fonctionne pour passer / recevoir des appels via le SIP de Free (Freephonie).