50 days on T-Mobile and, yeah, not loving it
About 50 days ago on a cold winter’s day I journeyed from a children’s covid-safe entertainment event to a T-Mobile and updated the SIMs in our devices because for some reason the Sprint SIMs were no longer supported going forward.
I’ve tried to give T-Mobile every benefit of the doubt, every chance, and yeah, so far it’s Sprint but with a whole lot more spam. A whole lot.
Because I wanted to play with them, I went ahead and purchased Visual Voicemail, and the Spam Guard app. Spam Guard catches fewer than one spammer a day, and lets a couple through with no caller ID information that are always car warranty telemarketers. It’s also misidentified a plumber I worked with as a scammer.
In 30 days, 22 calls blocked as spammers, 40 or so with no caller ID display name let through. Seriously, just give the option to not ring on no display name, that would get most of them.
Visual Voicemail is extremely slow, no ability to select multiple voicemails to delete, and basically a real letdown from what Google Voice is capable of doing for free and has been since several years ago. Visual Voicemail is about to get the axe as well as Scam Shield.
There’s no integration between T-Mobile’s Visual Voicemail and the Scam Shield, so if you want to report someone who ended up in voicemail without ringing your phone, good luck with that.
Speaking of ending up in voicemail without ringing your phone – I thought these days were long gone, something of a Sprint Relic from 2018, but no. Brand new phone, T-Mobile, all the bars, full signal, 5G, and we’re not ringing my phone. Straight to voicemail. Great.
The next complaint is the insane garbage no spam checking email to SMS gateway. There is no way they’re doing even cursory checks on this. Spam after spam claiming they’re T-Mobile and I’ve won something.
Now, I could disable the email to SMS gateway and only get the countless known “we buy houses” spam texts, but I have actual use for this.
But yeah, I’d hoped all the hype about Shaken/Stirred and ending false caller ID would have done something, but I get car warranty calls on a pretty regular basis now, not caught, and that’s not great.
I don’t know if it got a lot worse in the past two months, but I left Sprint with some spam and leaving free tools behind, and entered T-Mobile with garbage galore and tools that do not seem to do anything.
