[throw_away]

Moreover, people who want to change how phone addressing works rarely consider the fact that the people who can email me are not the same people who I want to call me on voice. Or the fact that sometimes I change my number with the intent of denying that ability to people who knew the old number. Or the fact that the region-locality of numbers often yields useful information about the person on the other end.

[SwellJoe]

These are social problems with simple technical solutions. Making it default to going to voicemail, with only a whitelist of callers ringing through, is one possible solution. Having it respond with a message that suggests using email instead is probably the one I would use, since I hate phone calls from just about everybody, except family.

[anamax]

> These are social problems with simple technical solutions.

that don't work.

I'd much rather change phone numbers than screw around with a whitelist and the other solution is worse than whitelists because it connects my phone number to my e-mail, which I don't give out. (Thanks to various directory services, phone numbers provide location information. Why would I want my e-mail to get geo-targetted spam?)