Nomorobo for All! Stop Spam Calls and Telemarketers in Their Tracks

Robocalls and telemarketers continue to plague consumers. According to the Federal Communications Commission, Americans receive about 2.4 billion robocalls a month. In response to this trend, we partnered with Nomorobo and started providing complimentary robocall blocking to auto-renewing subscribers in January. Since then, we’ve filtered out over 200,000 robocalls this year.

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But we know spam calls are only getting worse. To do our part in combating this increasingly common problem, Burner is now making Nomorobo available to all users on our platform—free trial numbers and credits-based temporary lines as well as auto-renewing subscription lines will now have access to Nomorobo at no extra cost.

No spam filter is better suited than Nomorobo to clear the lines of all Burner users of unwanted phone calls. Winner of the FTC Robocall Challenge, Nomorobo now has the most comprehensive blacklist of known spammers—560,000 and counting—and their system grows smarter each day.

“We at Nomorobo are super excited that all Burner users are getting tools to fight back against the robocall epidemic.”

— Aaron Foss, Founder of Nomorobo

HOW TO GET NOMOROBO WORKING ON YOUR BURNERS:

1. Activate Nomorobo

To activate the Nomorobo Connection, navigate to the Settings of your Burner and activate it like you would any other toggle setting.

The Nomorobo Connection will get turned on by default for all new subscription Burner (auto-renewing lines with unlimited calls/texts/pics).

2. Robocalls and telemarketers are filtered out automatically

Robocalls and telemarketers are pre-scanned, and filtered out automatically. Those calls won’t ring to your phone.

Nomorobo works by cross-referencing the incoming number with “a MASSIVE database of known, illegal robocallers ... compiled with the help of the FTC, user reports, and [their] own honey traps.” Honey traps, also known as honeypots, are hidden security mechanisms designed to fool robots and other spammers (see Nomorobo’s FAQ).

3. View Filtered calls

If a call finds a match in Nomorobo’s database, it gets placed into the “Filtered” section of your call history.

If there’s no match, the call rings to your phone.

4. Whitelist non-spam numbers

If a call was Filtered incorrectly (or you believe the system made an error), tap the call and then select “Move to Inbox” to whitelist the number.

In the future, calls made to you from this number will ring to your phone.

If you have any feedback or questions about how Nomorobo works with Burner, feel free to email us at support@burnerapp.com.

The Nomorobo Connection is available FOR both Burner for iOS and Burner for Android.

Rolling Out a Stack of New Features and Smart Phone Capabilities with Burner 3.3

We’re on a mission at Burner – to build a better, smarter phone number.  

Today we’re rolling out a stack of features and updates, including a new Google Sheets Connection for text and contact exporting, a new-and-improved Slack Connection, exciting new VoIP and tablet capabilities, and a number of other enhancements including bulk message actions and an easier way to connect Burner to IFTTT and Zapier.

New Connection: Google

We’ve been thrilled by the response to our recently launched Connections platform (original blog post).  The best part of it is seeing how people use the various connections, in particular our Developer Connection – which lets users connect Burner to any webhook-enabled web service.  A number of people wanted to pump incoming Burner texts into Google Sheets, which they enabled via Zapier (recipe), so we decided to make that integration native.  

Now you can directly authorize a connection to Google from within Burner, and all incoming texts are automatically added to a new Sheet as they come in, with all new contacts being added to a separate tab.

We’ve overhauled our Slack Connection as well, affording greater control over how teams can use Burner from within Slack.  Now you can connect a Burner to a Slack channel (where any team member in the channel can see or reply) OR connect to Slackbot, which lets you use Slack as your personal texting client with Burner numbers.  We’ve also refreshed our commands around a “/burner” syntax.

Our users have been coming up with lots of interesting uses for the Slack connection, from customer service to public Q&A’s – and we think all companies interested in talking to customers by text should give this a try.   Hit us up with questions or comments at 310.919.5060 if you want to experience it yourself.  We’ll hit you back via our Slack 2.0 connection.

Finally, we’ve made it easier to connect Burner to IFTTT and Zapier – two services that let you create hundreds of custom recipes across dozens of services.  Want to flash the lights when you get a voicemail, or text your thermostat a new temperature setting? Just navigate in the app to the Developer Connection and you’ll find new links and walk-throughs.

In-App Calling, Powered by VOIP

Perhaps the biggest feature we’re rolling out starting today is a new capability allowing users to control whether calls come in and out via their underlying carrier phone (which is how Burner has historically worked) or calls are made and received within the app itself (via VoIP).  This lets users choose the call flow they prefer and makes Burner much more useful in wifi-only situations, on tablets, across multiple devices, and even internationally.

It's something many users have asked for, and we hope will love.

Burner In-app calling (VoIP) options are available today on Android and will be rolling out on iOS over the next few weeks.

 

OTHER NEW THINGS

Number Picker:  Now you can choose from a list of possible numbers and pick one that is easy to memorize. The devil may be in the details, but so is satisfaction.  You choose a local number that suits you, and isn’t that the way things should be?

Bulk delete and mark-as-read:  Many of us use Burner to avoid large numbers of unwanted calls and texts, all of which occupied inbox real estate and generated unnecessary “red ball” notifications on the app icon.  Now you can clear these with bulk actions that let you mark-as-read or delete large batches of messages.  (From within a line or the “recent messages” context, just pull down to see these options.)

Offline support:  Burner now offers better support for reading your messages offline too.

Of course these features join many others, including text auto-replies, bot replies, custom photo backgrounds and line colors, message reminders, and so much more.

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We are building phone numbers from the future.  The future isn’t taking what you get and making do - the future is about choice, flexibility and utility.  We are relentless about bringing the future of phone numbers to our customers, and Burner connections,VOIP and the many improvement we’ve made to the latest version of Burner are collectively a big step forward. Check it out here.

Download Burner today!

Slack Integration for Mobile and a Dialer That Will Make You Say “WOW.”

The Slack Connection is one of our most popular, so we’ve included two small but important updates in this release (3.2.7).  As before, you can connect any Burner line to Slack, and inbound texts, pictures, and voicemails to that Burner will appear in the selected channel for everyone on the team to see and reply to. As a new option outbound texts sent from the mobile app, can now also be sent to Slack.  

Visiting the settings screen of your Burner number (click the gear icon). After you have connected Slack to your phone number the  above options will appear.

We’ve also improved our handling of links emojis, and other formatted elements on outbound texts sent from Slack to another phone number. Yes, that is correct:  you can text people directly from slack, and you, or you and your team can see the results (choose wisely).

We’re also excited to announce the first in a series of updates centered around enhancing the way inbound and outbound calls work in Burner. The most noticeable change in 3.2.7 is a completely redesigned dialer, which we love the look of, and should be easier for those of you with small hands or big phones (or both!) to use, as we’ve positioned the keypad towards the bottom of the screen.  One beta tester’s response to the dialer was “wow,” and the whole Burner team loves a wow factor, so we are pretty happy. Try it out and have a guaranteed “wow” moment.

Underlying the new design of the Dialer is another big change that we’re keeping under wraps for now, but will start rolling out over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more!