Well I’ve been meaning to look into jmp.chat for like a year and finally got a chance, and it’s very interesting. I do have some questions, it’d be great to know the answers to these:
- I currently use Monocles as my mobile XMPP client (yet another Conversations fork) and Gajim on desktop, will these (especially Monocles) work well with JMP.chat? I don’t want to give up emoji reacts and message replies in XMPP and I saw somewhere that Cheogram doesn’t support these yet.
- I currently use a hardware SIP phone (a recent Grandstream wifi phone) for most of my calling, will it be easy to use with JMP.chat and will TLS+SRTP be supported?
- How good is the filtering of spam calls? I stayed on Google Voice for years because nobody else had credible spam filtering, and only jumped ship to a certain mom & pop VOIP provider once they got spam filtering which works somewhat well. This is important because if there are too many spam calls I’ll just start ignoring the phone altogether.
Ahh okay, I saw on some XMPP clients feature grid that Cheogram didn’t have those features, good to know that it does.
No TLS/SRTP for SIP phones is really rough but I understand supporting SIP hardware isn’t a primary goal for you guys. Maybe I could have calls also ring my existing provider for when I want to answer them on my hardware device? But then I’d be paying double per-minute rates, and I’m not sure how outbound calling would work.
As far as spam filtering, not sure what my provider does by default, and some numbers I’ve had with them have been spammier than others, but with a recent spammy one, I dug around in their control panel and was able to make a rule to direct calls with a STIR/SHAKEN attestation level below X (my choice) straight to voicemail, or do whatever else with it. In that case I dumped all level C calls direct to voicemail and spam calls immediately dropped by about 90%. They also have the ability to do this with caller ID blocked calls, and ones without valid North American caller ID. And they have a “press 1 to connect” feature but I haven’t tried that one yet.
If your current provider gives you a SIP URI for inbound, we can forward calls there as well at no extra charge. And yeah, outbound won’t work that way.
So the main thing you’re looking for is an option to block level C attestation calls. That’s something I think we have all the information for, but haven’t made an option for yet.
I think they also have some always-on secret sauce spam filtering similar to whatever Google Voice has, but I don’t really remember details and a cursory search didn’t turn up much. I originally switched from Voice after reading about it, though.
But, there’s no way to tell how many spam calls it’s blocking because there are no logs for that. So I don’t know if, on my spammy number, it’s blocking 3x the level C calls which actually made it thru, or what.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk this over with me. Spam filtering is a must-have for me because if I get too many spam calls ringing thru, my brain will assign all calls to the Noise category, at which point the phone becomes much less useful to me.
Depending on your use case you can set all calls that aren’t from known contacts to go straight to voicemail