UPDATED: Silence iPhone Spammers Forever with Silent Running

Like most people, the iPhoneWriter.com team hates spam in all its forms and permutations.  Electronic mail, snail mail, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and unsolicited telephone calls all qualify as "spam" in our book and they're all obnoxious.  We find unsolicited telephone calls to be particularly irritating.  How many times have you been in a meeting or driving or whatever, and had your Apple iPhone ring only to find a "phone spammer" on the other end?  Ugh.

Well, after one too many calls wondering if we were interested in having our carpets steam cleaned, enough was finally enough and we decided to stop the madness once and for all.  The end result is a simple (and dare we say elegant) way to silence telephone spammers forever.  Ah, the sweet sound of silence.

Here's how you can silence the telephone spammers on your Apple iPhone:

1. Download iPhoneWriter.com's Silent Running ringtone and import it into iTunes.  Once imported (it's a tiny file so it should import almost instantly) the file should show up on the "Ringtones" tab.
   
2. Connect your Apple iPhone to your computer and synch your Ringtones, putting the Silent Running ringtone onto the Apple iPhone in the process.
   
3. Once the Silent Running ringtone has been synced to your Apple iPhone, create a new Contact on your Apple iPhone.  
4. Name the new Contact whatever you like.  We recommend something that you will easily (visually) recognize as unimportant should you happen to see the phone ringing or be reviewing your Recent Calls list.   We chose "Phone Spammer" as the contact name, for obvious reasons.
   
5. Assign Silent Running as the ringtone for the newly created Contact.

The next time an unknown or undesired phone number calls your Apple iPhone, simply add the number to the new Contact you created in Step #3.  Also, review your Recent Calls list for unknown or undesired phone numbers (telephone numbers you know to belong to "phone spammers") and add those to the same Contact.   The next time you synch the Apple iPhone and iTunes, the "phone spammer" contact will be synched with your Address Book, along with all of the assigned telephone numbers.

That's it, enjoy the silence!