Registering my phone number with the TPS stopped most the sales calls we received - it takes about a month to kick in though and doesn't stop overseas sales calls.

Our phone number is registered with the TPS (BT gave us three new numbers in as many months, instead of my old number when I did an RTD from Bulldog). However it is not in our name on the TPS database, I discovered this when I came to register it as it said the number was already registered.

The answerphone seems to work well as a deterrent though.

In reply to a post by mand_beckett:

Rather than anon call reject you could try choose to refuse. It allows you to block a number at exchange level, even if it's withheld.

That's good. I didn't realise that was how it worked. Thanks Mand.

One of the reasons we haven't replaced our old and creaking Diverse 2010 setup is because we find 1571 perfectly adequate and don't want an answer machine.

But that's a factor we hadn't thought of.

TPS is becoming useless in my opinion. If it wasn't free I would probably ditch it.