Allow Skype To Block Unwanted Calls
Brian Scarano
Unwanted call blocking is a feature that helps block your Skype Number from receiving unwanted spam calls. It's free to use, and the best part is you'll get less interruptions from intrusive spam calls.
Changing this setting does not apply to incoming voice messages or calls to your Skype Number. Anyone can still leave you a voice message. However, with your Skype Number you can set the option toAllow Skype to block unwanted calls.
Not all Skype calls come from people to whom you want to talk. If you receive calls from nuisance callers, you may want to block them from calling you in the future. You have two options when blocking callers. Skype allows you to block calls from anyone not currently on your contact list, which is the preferred option if you receive nuisance calls from a multitude of numbers. However, you may also block a single contact, which is preferred if you need to keep an open channel for non-contacts.
C. Taylor embarked on a professional writing career in 2009 and frequently writes about technology, science, business, finance, martial arts and the great outdoors. He writes for both online and offline publications, including the Journal of Asian Martial Arts, Samsung, Radio Shack, Motley Fool, Chron, Synonym and more. He received a Master of Science degree in wildlife biology from Clemson University and a Bachelor of Arts in biological sciences at College of Charleston. He also holds minors in statistics, physics and visual arts.
With the external access feature in Teams, you can allow users in your organization to chat and meet with people outside the organization who are using Microsoft as an identity provider. You can configure external access with:
People from outside your organization won't have access to your teams, sites, or other Microsoft 365 resources. If you want them to have access to your teams and channels, see Collaborate with guests in a team and Collaborate with external participants in a shared channel.
Your users can add apps when they host meetings or chats with people outside your organization. They can also use apps shared by external users when they join meetings or chats hosted externally. The data policies of the hosting user's organization, as well as the data sharing practices of any third-party apps shared by that user's organization, are applied. Learn more about use of apps by people outside your organization.
The meeting lobby can control how people outside your organization join meetings. For more information, see Control who can bypass the meeting lobby in Microsoft Teams and Configure the Microsoft Teams meeting lobby for sensitive meetings.
Each external access option has both an organization setting and user policies. The organization settings apply to your entire organization. User policies determine which users can use the options that you've configured at the organization level.
Configure the organization settings to specify which types of external meetings and chat you want to allow. Then configure user policies for the users who should have access to these features. Both the organization settings and user policies are turned on by default.
For meetings and chat with other Microsoft 365 organizations, you can specify which domains you want to trust. By default, all external domains are allowed. You can allow or block certain domains in order to define which organizations your organization trusts for external meetings and chat.
In order to chat and meet with people in external domains, the organizations that you trust must also trust your organization, and their users must be enabled for external access. If not, they won't be able to chat with users in your organization and are considered anonymous when joining meetings hosted by your organization. Learn more about meetings with other Microsoft 365 organizations.
You can specify which domains are allowed or which domains are blocked. If you specify blocked domains, all other domains are allowed; if you specify allowed domains, all other domains are blocked. There are four scenarios for configuring trusted organizations:
Allow all external domains - The default setting in Teams, and it lets users in your organization find, call, chat, and set up meetings with people external to your organization in any domain.
Allow only specific external domains - By adding domains to an Allow list, you limit external access to only the allowed domains. Once you set up a list of allowed domains, all other domains are blocked.
Block specific domains - By adding domains to a Block list, you can communicate with all external domains except the ones you've blocked. Once you set up a list of blocked domains, all other domains are allowed.
By default, when you block domains, subdomains aren't blocked. For example, if you block contoso.com, marketing.contoso.com isn't blocked. If you want to block all subdomains, you can use the Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration PowerShell cmdlet with the -BlockAllSubdomains parameter. For example:
A new admin control is being introduced to block federation with Teams trial-only tenants. Currently, trial tenants have access to the full feature set of Teams for about 30 days before being billed. However, this control can be exploited by malicious actors to launch phishing or abuse attacks against Teams users. To embrace the secure-by-default mindset for our customers, we'll disable trial tenant federation by default for all tenants and require explicit tenant action if a tenant wants or needs to federate with any trial tenants.
This change will be rolled out globally starting June 17, 2024, and is expected to complete by June 30, 2024. There will be a 30-day period for tenants to review and update the default setting before it's enforced. If no action is taken, the default value Blocked will be applied after this time.
When set to Blocked, all external access with users from Teams subscriptions that contain only trial licenses will be blocked. This means users from these trial-only tenants won't be able to search and contact your users via chats, Teams calls, and meetings (using the users' authenticated identities) and your users won't be able to reach users in these trial-only tenants.
If you want to restrict external access for most trial tenants, but still allow a few legitimate trial-tenants with which you need to federate, you'll need to purchase a license for those specific accounts.
If you want chats and calls to arrive in the user's Skype for Business client, configure your users to be in any mode other than TeamsOnly. For more information, see Understand Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business coexistence and interoperability.
You can choose to enable or disable chat with external unmanaged Teams users (users not managed by an organization, such as Microsoft Teams (free)). If you allow chat with unmanaged Teams users, you can further control how your users communicate with them:
If you want to allow external unmanaged Teams users to start the conversation, select the External users with Teams accounts not managed by an organization can contact users in my organization checkbox.
If you want to restrict communication with people with unmanaged Teams accounts to a specific list of user profiles, select the Restrict communication to the list of external user profiles added to extended directory checkbox and select Manage external user profiles to add the user profiles that you want to allow. (See manage external user profiles below.)
If External users with Teams accounts not managed by an organization can contact users in my organization is turned off, unmanaged Teams users can't search by email address to find users in your organization. All communications with unmanaged Teams users must be initiated by users in your organization.
External user profiles are based on phone numbers. You can add the name and phone numbers of people outside your organization and they'll be invited to communicate with people in your organization by using Teams on their mobile device. If they don't have Teams installed, they will receive a link to install it via SMS. Once they have created a Teams account, they can also use Teams on the desktop. You can delegate management of the user profiles by using the Extended Directory User Administrator role in Azure AD.
When a profile is added for someone outside your organization, it's available to your users via search by name or phone number within 24 hours. Users can start a 1:1 or group chat with the external users and can see the external users' profile cards with the information that you specify.
You can also configure the Restrict communication to the list of external user profiles added to extended directory setting in PowerShell by using the Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy cmdlet with the RestrictTeamsConsumerAccessToExternalUserProfiles parameter. For example:
Follow these steps to let Teams users in your organization chat with and call Skype users. Teams users can then search for and start a one-on-one text-only conversation or an audio/video call with Skype users and vice versa.
If you've enabled one of the external access settings for the organization, you can specify which users in your organization can chat or meet with people outside your organization by using an external access policy (both of these must be enabled for users to chat or meet with people outside your organization.).
You can use the following example script, substituting parameter for the control you want to change, PolicyName for the name you want to give the policy, and UserName for each user for whom you want to enable/disable external access.
I have my skype privacy settings defined to only allow IMs from people in my contact list. I also have this set for calls/video, etc. And yet, almost every morning when I boot up I have a conversation request from somebody I do not know. Shouldn't these settings block these requests? Is there a way to actually only allow IMs from people in my contact list in skype that works?
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