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Thirdlane

Call Screening

Call Screening asks callers to identify themselves before your phone rings, so you know who is calling and can decide whether to take the call - especially helpful for calls with no caller ID or from numbers you do not recognize. Unlike Call Blocking, which rejects calls outright, screening lets legitimate callers through while filtering out anonymous or unwanted ones. It also pairs with Find Me / Follow Me so you hear who is calling before answering a call that was forwarded to another phone.

You can specify call screening options for calls with or without a caller id.

For calls with caller id you can request that the callers announce themselves. You can also enter a list of caller ids for the callers you would like to exclude from screening.

For calls without caller id you can request that the callers announce themselves and/or enter their caller id.

You can combine Call Screening with Find Me / Follow Me. If you would like to hear callers’ announcements while receiving a forwarded call you should check “Play caller announcement while in follow-me mode “.

Note that you can enter the information once and then “Enable” or “Disable” Call Screening as needed.

Best practices

  • Exclude the people you always want to reach you (family, key colleagues, top customers) from screening so they are never asked to announce themselves.
  • Enable the follow-me announcement (“Play caller announcement while in follow-me mode”) when you forward calls to your mobile, so you can tell a screened business call from a personal one before answering.
  • Screen instead of block for unknown callers when you would rather vet a call than risk rejecting a legitimate one.