Posts Tagged ‘Vonage’

Gross hack of the day: adding names to Vonage voicemail email notifications

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

I’ve been using Vonage for telephone service for a couple of months, and I’m quite happy with it.  Their feature set is quite competitive, and I’m paying them significantly less than I’d be paying Verizon, Comcast or RCN for equivalent service.  (Shameless plug: if you’d like to give Vonage a try, send me email and I’ll send you a referral.  Both you and I will get a free month of service.)

You can configure Vonage to email you about voicemail messages.  The email contains the actual voicemail message as an audio attachment, but what it doesn’t have, inexplicably, is the name of the caller pulled from caller ID.  This has annoyed me ever since we switched to Vonage, and I recently finally got annoyed enough to finally do something about it.  I’m posting my solution here on the off chance that it’ll be useful to others.

To take advantage of this hack, you have to have the ability to filter the contents of your incoming email, e.g., with procmail.  If you don’t know what that means, then you should probably stop reading now. :-/

My solution consists of two scripts and two configuration changes.  First, the scripts:

  1. The script vmail-cid.pl fetches the caller ID information for recent calls from www.vonage.com and saves it in a CSV file.
  2. The script vonage-vmail-filter.pl reads the aforementioned caller ID CSV file, as well as a CSV file you’ve exported from your Outlook contacts, and uses the information in those files to filter a voicemail notification email message on stdin and send the (possibly modified) notification to stdout.  You can configure the script which of the two CSV files to read, i.e., you can take advantage of either the caller ID information from vmail-cid.pl, or the Outlook export CSV, or both.

Now, the configuration changes:

  1. You need to set up a scheduled task, cron job, or whatever to run vmail-cid.pl periodically to keep the caller ID CSV file up-to-date.
  2. You need to tie vonage-vmail-filter.pl into your email delivery, e.g., by editing your .procmailrc file (for which there is an example in a comment at the top of the script), sieve configuration, or whatever.

When all of this is done properly, then every voicemail notification you receive will be updated with the caller ID or Outlook Contacts name for the calling phone number, if it’s available, before it lands in your mailbox.

Click here to download a zip file containing the scripts.  See the comments at the top of the scripts for additional details.  As always, please feel free to send me any questions, comments and suggestions you might have.

Enjoy!

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How to lower your phone + internet cost from $80 per month to $50 per month: buy your own cable modem and kick Comcast to the curb

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Comcast was charging me $95 per month for internet and phone service.  That was too much.

I got them to lower it to $75 per month, but I had to pay extra for all non-local and long-distance calls.  That was still too much.

They raised the equipment charge for my cable modem from $3 to $5 per month.  That pissed me off, so I bought my own cable modem.

Not only that, but I decided it was time to send Comcast a message for being so slimy, so I switched to Vonage for phone service for $25 per month.  You would think that would have lowered my total cost, except that when I canceled my Comcast phone service, I was no longer eligible for the special “bundle” rate on internet service, so they jacked up my internet service to $60 per month.

That pissed me off even more, so when I called today to swap out Comcast’s cable modem for my own, I also told them to downgrade me to their $40 per month internet service.

Believe it or not, what you get for that ridiculously high price is a 1mbps internet connection.  Yes, you read that right, one megabit.

Fortunately, Comcast isn’t the only game in town.  RCN will sell me a 1.5mbps connection, 50% faster than Comcast’s, for $25 per month, i.e., 37% less.  That’s not even a promotional rate.  Or, if I feel like spending $5 more per month, I can get a 10mbps connection, i.e., ten times as fast as Comcast for 25% less.  And although that is a promotional rate, unlike Comcast, RCN will let me sign up for any new promotion that becomes available after my 12-month contract is up.  Heck, even Verizon charges only $20 per month, half of what Comcast charges, for a 1mbps DSL line!

I haven’t switched to RCN yet, but I’ll probably be doing it some day soon when I’m in just the right mood.

Below is the letter I just sent the CEO of Comcast explaining how they managed to lose an $80 per month revenue stream over a lousy $2 per month. (more…)

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Posted in Boston, Computers, Consumer activism, Internet | 6 Comments »