Spam has been a scourge of email for decades—but even before that, unsolicited telemarketing calls were the bane of the phone system. That plague of unwanted marketing calls has proceeded into the digital age, with services like Google Voice sometimes being inundated with calls from telemarketers. Now, Google has rolled out a new spam filtering tool for Google Voice that will automatically route calls, voicemail, and texts Google thinks are spam to a user’s spam folder. The filtering system is based on Google’s own spam identification tools, as well as feedback the company receives from Google Voice users reporting spam in Google Voice.
Google Voice users can activate the feature in the Calls tab in Google Voice settings: just enable the checkbox for Global SPAM Filtering.
In the event Google’s spam filtering incorrectly marks a number as spam, users can unblock it by selecting the message and selecting “Not Spam” within the Google Voice spam folder.
“With your continued help marking spammy numbers (and correcting mis-labeled spam), we can continue to refine our filter and prevent annoying unwanted calls from making it to other Google Voice users,” wrote Google’s Alexander Rybak, in the Google Voice blog.
