I just wish various Doctors and Dentists could jump on the text/email bandwagon. Those two groups are responsible for nearly all of my phone usage - with a slim minority (that is itself mostly spam) being calls from my bank.

Even with banks I do not trust incoming calls and always return the call using an official phone number from the bank’s HTTPS secured website.

> I just wish various Doctors and Dentists could jump on the text/email bandwagon.

Mine have already, and I assumed it was becoming ubiquitous already.

I'm frustrated with it because I get multiple texts, multiple emails, and multiple voice calls & voice messages for every appointment I make. I want maybe one text reminder the day before or a couple of hours before and no more, just in case I forgot to set my own reminder. But usually I do have it in my calendar reminding me anyway, just two more notifications on top of the 10 the doc/dentist sends me... :P

They are subject to HIPAA comstraints.

More precisely an over-cautious interpretation of HIPAA that happens to annoy patients and is specifically called out by HHS.

Note that an individual has the right under the Privacy Rule to request and have a covered health care provider communicate with him or her by alternative means or at alternative locations, if reasonable. See 45 C.F.R. § 164.522(b). For example, a health care provider should accommodate an individual’s request to receive appointment reminders via e-mail, rather than on a postcard, if e-mail is a reasonable, alternative means for that provider to communicate with the patient. By the same token, however, if the use of unencrypted e-mail is unacceptable to a patient who requests confidential communications, other means of communicating with the patient, such as by more secure electronic methods, or by mail or telephone, should be offered and accommodated.

Patients may initiate communications with a provider using e-mail. If this situation occurs, the health care provider can assume (unless the patient has explicitly stated otherwise) that e-mail communications are acceptable to the individual. If the provider feels the patient may not be aware of the possible risks of using unencrypted e-mail, or has concerns about potential liability, the provider can alert the patient of those risks, and let the patient decide whether to continue e-mail communications.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/570/does-hip...

There's something in HIPAA saying how the provider is to contact you? Over which channels? I'm sceptical. I get texts from my dentist and in-app notification from doctor.

You have to ensure a channel that doesn’t gratuitously leak. Email took a very long time to be accepted, especially after things like hotmail and especially gmail arrived.

This is why fax is still so common in medicine and law (in law there’s also a belief that a fax confirmation says it’s been delivered, if not read, while email is considered less reliable / more easily deniable.

Yup, my voicemail box is constantly full of spam messages to the point where, my voicemail's regularly full, I couldn't be bothered to listen to any of them any more and it's too much effort to clean it out. My last carrier used to send a text if I got a voicemail. If I got a text saying I got a voicemail from someone I knew, I'd call back, if it was a random number, I'd just delete the text.

"Hi jimmy, this is your mother. My phone died so I am calling you from the hospital phone. Your dad is in the hospital. Come quick."

In the above scenario that happened to me, sometimes you just don't have time to let the information find you.

While this is a possible scenario- in my experience most people know to call multiple times - especially if they know that the recipient won’t recognize the number.

I don’t usually answer my phone from unknown numbers, but when I get three calls from the same number within 3 minutes I’ll pick it up.

I’m not getting into ALL the details but the “repeatedly calling” back and forth between two numbers quite honestly kept me out of jail overseas due to an embarrassing miscommunication and unintended breaking of a local law (backpacking in college, drinks were had, a friend made an ass out of himself if you must know)

I called a local friend, he didn’t answer. I called his wife she didn’t either. Both follow the “don’t answer unknown numbers” rule. As do I.

It wasn’t until I called friend a second time that he answered the phone. His response? “When my wife got a call from the same number back to back is when I started thinking this must be worth my attention.”

This is a nice example of port-knocking: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Port_knocking.

I wonder if it would be possible to set up something like this more rigorously. Give everyone unrelated two phone numbers. The first never rings the phone. The second only rings if the first was called within the last minute.

Or perhaps just a pin they have to enter in order to get the first phone to actually ring. Basically 2fa for the right to bother me.

With a creative dialplan design one could do this with a private Asterisk installation (asterisk is behind so many of these cheap disposable phone number/voip providers anyway), though I suppose if one wanted to use someone else’s platform and infrastructure it’d be probably less effort with twilio or plivo

>While this is a possible scenario- in my experience most people know to call multiple times - especially if they know that the recipient won’t recognize the number.

I'm surprised robocallers don't do this too

Calling once selects for people more likely to fall for the actual scam.

Also, spamming/scamming in general is a numbers game. It's generally more profitable to move onto the next number on the list than to keep retrying.

They do

That would suck, but fear of that scenario isn't enough to make me answer my phone for spammers 5 times a day.

Also, I'd hope they'd have the initiative to leave both a voicemail and an SMS.

Especially with a service like Google Voice that will transcribe your voicemails. I will look at those; it takes a fraction of a second to dismiss the spam.

Fortunately, I only get a few of those a week, so far.

Check your spam folder. I find Google voice itself is pretty good at blocking spam calls/messages/texts.

Wow...