The Doorman Phone Lobby

A hotel doesn’t let strangers wander the halls knocking on doors. They come in through the lobby, and someone at the desk asks who they are here to see. Your Doorman answers the phone the same way.

Your phone now has a front desk. We call the rules behind it call filtering: deciding which calls ring through and what other callers hear first. For the wider terminology, read call screening vs. call filtering.

Two doors

Every call that reaches your house is sorted before a single handset rings.

People you know walk straight in. When the number calling matches someone on your household’s list, the Doorman says “Welcome, I’ll connect you” and the whole house rings, just like a regular phone line.

Everyone else waits in the lobby. An unfamiliar number hears “Welcome to the phone lobby. Please dial an extension.” Your house stays quiet while they hear the greeting. If the caller knows a family extension, the code you gave a friend, a babysitter or a grandparent, they dial it and that handset rings. If they dial nothing, the Doorman follows the rule you chose for that line. Out of the box it says “Good day” and hangs up.

Under the default rule, an automated caller that doesn’t enter an extension never reaches a ringing handset. A caller who enters a valid extension can ring it; choosing the ring-the-house fallback also lets an unfamiliar caller through without a code.

You choose what happens to strangers

The lobby’s quiet “Good day” is only the starting setting. For each phone line you can instead:

• Take a message, so an unknown caller can leave voicemail without interrupting dinner.
• Ring the house, if a line is one you want strangers to reach, such as a number you’ve put on a flyer.

Extensions are meant to be shared. Give the kids’ room one, give Grandma another, and change them whenever you like. A caller who keeps guessing wrong codes is turned away.

What the lobby can’t promise

Caller ID shows the number a caller claims to be calling from, and it can be faked. The list of familiar callers decides who skips the lobby. It doesn’t prove who is speaking.

So keep that list to numbers a stranger can’t look up, like your sister’s mobile, and leave out numbers that are printed on a website, like the school office or your plumber. Published numbers can still reach you: they dial an extension like everyone else.

Included with every Doorman

The lobby runs on the Doorman Brain in your home. It’s part of the free Doorman software, so you don’t need a paid Doorman plan to use it. Calls through an internet phone provider still need working power, internet access, and that separately configured service.