Occasionally I see a forum thread that contains enough interesting material that it could be the start of an article, but because it’s stretched through a number of posts, I can only link to the thread. And also, because I’m not the author of any of the original posts, I can’t just copy and paste without possibly violating someone’s copyright. This is one such thread, which discusses the possibility of creating user-specific whitelists or blacklists, or Caller ID name lookup sources in FreePBX or Asterisk. The Caller ID name lookup would be most useful to Google Voice users, since Google Voice doesn’t provide a Caller ID name on incoming calls, just a number. Since there is no way that a user can add or change such listings in the FreePBX interface at present, the trick seems to be to use Google Contacts as the user’s web interface, and then import the data from the user’s Google Contacts list into the Asterisk database at periodic intervals using a cron job.
The interesting thing about this is that it appears that users can have their own individual lists, since each user would apparently have their own Google Contacts, which means that a user could blacklist a caller without blacklisting that caller for all users on the system. It may be a bit tricky to figure out what’s being done from the posts shown, but still it looks like a possibly interesting technique.
Even though FreePBX 12 now offers a contact list in the User Control Panel, there are limitations on how it can be used. What is discussed in this thread apparently does not share those limitations, but does have the limitation that any changes made will not be seen by Asterisk until the next time the Google Contacts database is imported into Asterisk’s database, which is done using some downloadable software, a python script, and a cron job.
Thread here:
User-specific Caller ID/whitelist/blacklist in Asterisk/FreePBX (DSLReports.com)
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