How to block unwanted calls using Vonage and Google Voice

While most VoIP based telephone service providers allow features to block annoying telemarketers and SPAM calls, Vonage does not provide any feature to block calls but I still stick to Vonage for number of other features I really like. The following are 3 simple and easy steps to setup selective call blocking using combination of Vonage and Google Voice service. Not an elegant solution, but it does work, most importantly, its free :) I am using successfully for couple of years now.

Just follow the 3 steps below.

1. Get a free google voice number. Go to https://www.google.com/voice and follow the prompt to set it up with your home or cell (you should remove it later) and google chat as the forwarding numbers as shown below ...

Phones setting: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/gvsettings.png
Calls setting: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/gvcallsettings.png
Note: mine shows only google chat since I removed all forwarding numbers.

2. Login to your vonage account and setup simulring to ring your google voice as shown below
Simulring: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/simulring.png

3. Login to your vonage account and setup voicemail timeout settings as shown below
Vonage VM timeout: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/vmtimeout.png

After this, when ever you get an unwanted call, login to google voice, select history, find the unwanted number and select "block" from the pulldown menu under "more" as shown below ...
http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/gvblock.png

Note: Google does a pretty good job on its own blocking spam... as you can see, I did not have to block this 702-815-2394 number since google already did that for me :)

In addition, if you have a list of numbers to be blocked you can follow my original post below to setup a group of numbers to block.

https://forums.vonage.com/showpost.php?p=17184&postcount=56

Enjoy!