Help Us Put Robocallers Out Of Business

We’ve been protecting YouMail app users from unwanted robocalls for years.   In fact, we’ve actually invested tens of millions of dollars over that time to develop our  innovative, patented robocall detection algorithms and processes.

What most people don’t know is that we’ve also been protecting everyone in the US from some of the worst robocallers. To do so, we’ve partnered with law enforcement by providing them with examples of illegal calling behavior that support investigation and enforcement.   Illegal calls to YouMailers have been key elements of several successful legal actions, including shutting down gateway carriers in Arizona and Indiana, both of whom were responsible for huge amounts of illegal calling traffic.

Even if you didn’t know it, simply by using YouMail, you’ve been helping address the robocall epidemic!

That annoying spam call you got may well have turned out to be a piece of evidence used to force a robocaller to switch to a different career. In fact, we have considerable evidence that this has led to billions of fewer robocalls being made, and has kept the robocall problem from spiraling completely out of control.

So we thank you.  And 300 million Americans thank you.

But we can do much more, much faster, with more help from the YouMail user community.

Quite simply: we need to collect more evidence of bad behavior, from more calls to more users, who reside in more places, and do it more quickly.   The more evidence we collect, the faster the robocalling problem becomes less of a nuisance, which is great for everyone who wants to answer their phone again!

Changes To The YouMail Service

So, how are we going to do that?   And what’s the impact on the YouMail services?

The main thing is this: we’re simplifying the spam blocking behavior of the free service, and optimizing it to help with this fight. So we now:

• Keep known spammers from ringing your phone.
• Put any voicemails they leave into a spam folder, so your voicemail box is clean.
• Identify what type of call or who it was that we blocked and why.
• Ensure users can easily leave a detailed spam report when we get it wrong.
• Never count spam transcriptions and voicemails against free user limits.

These changes allow us to more quickly pull together more compelling evidence of illegal calls.  This helps enforcement get the bad guys causing the most havoc, and helps carrier partners find and shut down customers, before they scale their campaigns into the millions and tens of millions of calls.

Most free users won’t even notice the changes.  They’ll just feel really great, knowing that by using YouMail they’re actively helping address a massive problem.

However, these changes will impact on some users.  As part of this effort, we’re moving blocking features that don’t help shut bad guys down into the YouMail Plus service. That means, the free service will no longer:

• Play an out of service message to known spammers.
• Support extended blocking beyond the known spammer list (international calls, local calls, calls in particular prefixes, or calls that aren’t contacts).

This is because collecting needed evidence requires capturing as much audio as we can, and getting as many spam reports as we can.

For users who have a priority of being maximally protected, we get it.   So for those users who never want to see a potentially spammy call, or who simply want to customize call blocking, or who want to get taken off of call lists, upgrading to the YouMail Plus service will provide these features (and much more).

These changes take the robocaller fight to the next level, while providing great protection for free, even better protection for our premium users, and some meaningful protection for everyone in America.

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