Overview
Setup for Fritz! OS 7.20 and higher
Short Guide
Detailed instructions
Add further numbers and login with tellows
Edit blacklist
Register and secure benefits
Setup for Fritz! OS 7.19 and lower
Manual import of the blacklists
Help and support
FAQ / Frequently Asked Questions
Support
Your benefits
With the tellows call protection you can immediately recognise dubious telephone numbers. By importing the phone numbers that are considered dubious, the FRITZ!Box detects unwanted callers known to the tellows Community as soon as they ring.
It’s your choice whether you want to show incoming calls on the display or block them! The tellows Score helps assess the seriousness. The higher the score, the more dangerous the number was rated.
Reminder service: We will remind you by email so that your license does not expire unnoticed.
Short guide
This short guide is for FRITZ!Boxes with Fritz!OS 7.20 oder higher.
- 1. Click on „Create new phone book“ (in the Telephony / Phone book tab)
- 2. Select „Use the phone book of an online provider“
- 3. Select „CardDAV provider“
- 4. Fill in the following URL: https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/7/ in „Internet address of the CardDAV server“
- 5. Enter tellowsfritz as „Username“
- 6. As „Password“ enter your API key from the download PDF
- 7. Then repeat the steps for the second phone book with the URL https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/8-9/
- 8. Optional: Activate call blocker for incoming calls from the phone books
You can find all information about setting up the score lists in the following video (please activate subtitles)
Detailed instructions
Choose a name for the new phone book. After that select “Use the phone book of an online provider“ and click on „CardDAV provider“.
Here enter the required information. For that, select the following server address that is relevant for the telephone book you want to created. We recommend setting up two phone books with score 7 and score 8-9. Some FRITZ!Boxes do not support the large number of entries from the blacklist 7-9.
Server adresses
Score 7 (700 entries):
https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/7/
Score 8 und 9 (700 entries):
https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/8-9/
Score 7-9 (1400 entries – not supported by all devices):
https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/7-9/
If you have bought the score list license for another country, please replace the .co.uk of the server URL accordingly:
Austria: .at
Switzerland: .ch
Italy: .it
USer name
Use “tellowsfritz” as the user name.
Password
Here you enter your license code / API key (10 digits) from the download PDF-file of your shop account.
After saving, the phone book will be created. This process may take a few minutes. The data will be linked to the FRITZ!Box by the tellows server.
Warning: The active telephone book of a FRITZ!Fon is used by default to save contacts, but has nothing to do with the identification of calls. All the telephone books created in the FRITZ!Box are taken into account during identification in the FRITZ!Fon.
For how to increase the number of entries per phonebook, see the FAQs below.
The phone book is automatically updated once a day (usually at night).
More information about updating can be found here:
https://service.avm.de/help/de/FRITZ-Box-Fon-WLAN-7490/019/hilfe_howto_telefonbuch_sync
Set the call type to „incoming calls“ and select in the „Telephone Book“ number range. For the telephone book you choose the previously created phone book with score 7. Then click on „OK“ to complete the process.
The call blocking for the phone book with score 7 is now set up.
Repeat the process with score list 8-9 and both lists will be displayed in the call handling overview. Calls from numbers in these two lists are now no longer put through.
Note: When you set up the call blocking manually you have to create the rule again every time you import the score lists.
You can add, edit or delete entries in the tellows telephone book with the Fritz!Fon or in the FRITZ!Box itself. Newly added phone numbers are also published on tellows to warn other users of unwanted calls. If you have also registered at www.tellows.co.uk and linked your license code, the telephone numbers in your tellows telephone book will be synchronized in the FRITZ!Box. Numbers that you have blocked via the FRITZ!Fon are automatically assigned to your user account.
Block phone number
Open the desired number (e.g. from the call history) on the FRITZ!Fon and click on „Options“ 🠖 „Apply“. Assign a caller name and add the number to the contact („Paste“ from the cache) to save it in the phone book. From now on you will see the number in your tellows telephone book in the FRITZ!Box and in the FRITZ!Fon. After the next synchronization with the tellows online phone book server, the phone number entered will be displayed in the tellows phone book with score and category. Your added numbers are stored under the name „My Score“, followed by Score, caller name and category, and are above the community entries.
The number is then given a negative rating on tellows.co.uk, which can be viewed by other users and helps to better assess the number. If you have added the number to the tellows phone book Score 7, the number will be given a score of 7. If you have selected the phone book with score 8-9 when you add the number to the phone book, the number will be rated with a score of 8 on tellows.co.uk.
Attention: If you have selected a different phone book than the tellows phone books by default (e.g. your own contacts), the phone number will not be blocked or published on tellows. Before adding a new entry to your blacklist, select one of the tellows phone books as the active phone book.
Remove phone number (whitelist)
If you do not want to block a number in your tellows phone book in the future, you can remove the entry via „Options“ 🠖 „Delete“. This number will not appear in your phone book again. To search for phone numbers, use the international spelling +44, which is used for all entries in the phone book.
A neutral rating is given for the telephone number on tellows.co.uk. You can add the entry again at any time by adding the number to the phone book.
Edit phone number
You can edit the caller name of existing entries. If you know a more precise caller name for the number, you can change it under „Options“ 🠖 „Change“. For example you can add more details, so „Newspaper subscription renewal“ is displayed instead of „Newspapers“ in the future. This will then be displayed in the updated form in your tellows phone book. Your edited numbers are stored under the name „My Score“, followed by Score, caller name and category, and are above the community entries.
The number automatically receives a negative rating on tellows.co.uk with the new caller name entered, which in turn helps other users to better assess the number.
Attention: When adding, deleting or changing phone numbers in the tellows phone book, a rating is added to the number on tellows.co.uk. No personal data of the user will be published or transmitted.
Do you already use other tellows products and would like to have phone numbers that you have blocked on your Android phone in your FRITZ!Box list? No problem – after you have linked your license to your account on tellows.co.uk, all rated phone numbers (positive and negative) are taken into account when updating the telephone books and can be viewed in your member area on tellows.co.uk.
Link a tellows account
You have various options for connecting your license key to your user account:
For Amazon customers and tellows shop customers:
- Log in to tellows.co.uk or create a new account. You can then insert your license key in your member area under „My phone blacklist“ to connect it to the user account on tellows. One license key can only be linked to one user account. Subsequent changes are not possible. You can find the current term in the member area or in the FRITZ!Box when you open one of the tellows telephone books.
For tellows shop customers:
- You can use the same e-mail address in the tellows shop to purchase the score lists and for your account on the tellows website (only open ID possible). Your key is then automatically linked OR
- Use the link from your download document from the tellows shop to register on tellows.co.uk: “Log in now and link your shop account to your tellows account”. Then log in to tellows.co.uk and within the same browser session to link the accounts.
The personal blacklist contains all the numbers that you rated negatively and also the numbers that the community rated as dubious. Numbers that you rate with a score of less than 7 are added to the whitelist and not included in the blacklist, even if the community rating of the number has a negative score. Your own reviews have a higher priority than the community reviews. Negatively rated numbers are updated on the server after about 15 minutes and added to the personal blacklist. The next time the online phone book is updated, the evaluated phone numbers are also stored in the FritzBox phone book.
A free year of caller protection for partner products
Certain license keys from tellows partners receive an additional year of free call protection as a bonus after being linked.
More information on registration and personalization can be found here.
Download of the Scorelists
The links to blacklist 7 and blacklist 8-9 are available from our support team. Please send an email or contact us via support form with your license key. We will then provide you with the links immediately. If you click on the links, the blacklists will be downloaded. The most recent scorelist is then automatically generated and downloaded. Please note: Some browsers may include a warning when clicking on links.
→ The tellows Scorelists will never harm your computer in any way. You can download the files despite the warning.
Import into the FRITZ!Box
Open the web interface of your FRITZ!Box and select the menu point „Telephony“ and selct in the submenu „Telephone Book“ and click on „New Telephone Book“.
Create a new telephone book by clicking the button „Create as new“. Choose „tellows Score 7“ as the name for the telephone book and remove the tick at „copy existing telephone book“. Click „OK“ afterwards.
Now, click on „Restore“.
Click „Choose File” to load the previously downloaded tellows Scorelist 7 from your computer onto the FRITZ!Box. When you selected the correct file, click on „Restore Telephone Book“.
The tellows Scorelist with all numbers of the score 7 are now imported onto your FRITZ!Box. This may take few moments.
Repeat these Steps with the „tellows Scorelist 8 and 9“ – do not forget to name the new telephone book „Tellows Score 8-9“.
We recommend to update the tellows scorelists at least once a month. To do so, please download the lists again from your PDF-file or log in at shop.tellows.de to retrieve your download file again.
If you purchased the call protection from shop.tellows.de, you can extend the existing license without configuring your setup new. To do this, your old license must have expired. If you then purchase the product again with the same shop account that was used for the first purchase, your old license key can be reactivated.
After completing the purchase, you must open the PDF document with the documentation in the download area of your shop account, just as you did for the first purchase. At this moment your license will be reactivated. In the document you will find your license and a notice that the existing license has been extended. You do not have to do anything else. The FritzBox will automatically get the current lists with the reactivated license with the next update so that no new configurations are necessary.
If you have purchased your license from a partner shop (e.g. Amazon), you have to create an account on tellows.co.uk and link your license in the member area. All you have to do then is use the same email address from the website when purchasing in shop.tellows.de. Otherwise a new license will be created upon purchase and you will have to set up your call protection in the FritzBox with the new license.
We will remind you by email when your license has expired so that the call protection can continue to protect you and does not expire unnoticed.
How can I delete the tellows call protection?
If you no longer need or want to use the tellows phone books, select one of the created tellows phone books via the „Telephony“ 🠖 „Phone book“ tab. If the tellows phone book is active, click the red button above to delete the phone book. You receive a message: „All entries in the ‚tellows Score 7‘ phone book are saved by your online provider. If you add the ‚tellows Score 7‘ phone book managed on the Internet again at a later point in time, all entries will be available again. Do you want now remove the phone book ‚tellows Score 7‘?“ You can confirm this.
Then the entire phone book and all the rules created for it within the call block are deleted. Repeat the step with the second tellows phone book.
Why do I get „Error 22“ when setting up the CardDAV server?
If an error message occurs after the integration (error 22), the data was entered incorrectly and the server could not be accessed.
Make sure that there are no spaces before or after the server address. Use https and not http. Make sure that all characters in the URL are case-sensitive. If possible copy the URL from the instructions. If any character is missing or incorrect, you will not be able to connect to the server. Correct your information and then connect again.
Why do I get „Error 26“ while setting up the CardDAV server?
If an error message (e.g. error 26) occurs after the integration remove the phone book completely and recreate it. Occasionally, this error happens on the first attempt.
Make sure there is a slash at the end of the server address. If a character is missing, no connection to the server is possible. Phonebooks that were created and changed later may not save the changes correctly. Your corrections will likely not be taken into account if there was an error the first time you created the phone book. For this reason, the phone book should be created again. If you want to create the phone book again, we recommend restarting the FRITZ!Box and deleting the old incorrect phone book first.
It is important to give a recreated phone book again a different name than the previous created phone book. If you use the same name it can happen that the FRITZ!Box loads the old data import from the memory when the phone book is recreated.
Why am I still receiving calls from a scam caller or a number that has already been rated negatively by tellows?
It is possible that you are being called from numbers that tellows does not yet know. Unfortunately, we cannot cover 100% of all unwanted calls, as phone numbers change very frequently and we are only informed about them when they are reported by other users.
However, it is also possible that some of these numbers have already been reported on tellows, but are not in the phone book due to the phone book limit.
Due to the limitation of the FRITZ!Box phone book size, we cannot include all numbers with a negative tellows score in the lists. In order for numbers to be on the list, they must have a certain search volume and a certain number of reviews (at least 3) in the last few weeks. It is possible that the number will soon end up in the lists if users continue to report the number as active. We use this procedure so that numbers that are no longer active or that are improperly rated do not end up on the list.
You have the option of manually changing the blacklist size to increase the standard size so that numbers that meet the criteria but are too far back in the blacklist can still be added to the FritzBox list. To do this, follow the following instructions.
My phone constantly synchronises the phone book when I want to access it or make changes in the phone book. What can I do?
Older FRITZ!Boxes as well as older FRITZ!Fons may take more time or need more capacity when updating. We recommend reducing the number of entries in the phone book to reduce the load. The default value for the number of entries per phone book is 800. With 700 entries there are usually no problems. To create a phone book with fewer entries, you should remove the existing tellows phone books and create new ones with the following URLs:
https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/7/limit_700/
https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/8-9/limit_700/
The username and password will remain. You can try to increase the limit parameter further if you want to use more entries in your phone book and no performance problems occur with the FRITZ!Box.
Can I make changes to the online phone book?
You can remove, edit or manually add entries in the two tellows phone books at any time. You can find out how to proceed in the section about adding entries to the blacklist.
Can I increase the number of entries per phonebook?
The default value for the number of entries per phonebook is 800. Newer FRITZ!Boxes and current FRITZ!OS versions from 7.24 have improved support for online phone books and can also exceed the official phonebook limit of 1,000 entries without problems in most cases. We do not recommend the change for older FRITZ!Box versions. If you want to have more phone numbers in your phone book to extend the call protection, you can adjust the limit of phone book entries with the following URLs when creating the phone books:
https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/7/limit_1200/
https://dav.tellows.co.uk/score/8-9/limit_1200/
The total number of entries per phone book with these URLs is 1,200. The limit per phonebook is 2,000 entries. You can therefore increase the specified limit in the links further if your FRITZ!Box does not show loading problems. To create a phone book with more entries, you should remove the existing phone books and create new ones (editing phone books is only possible from FRITZ!OS 7.24 onwards, otherwise changes will be overwritten with the original value). The user name and password remain the same.
Why do I only see one active telephone book per phone?
The active telephone book of a FRITZ!Fon is used by default to save contacts, but has nothing to do with the identification or blocking of calls. All the telephone books created in the FRITZ!Box are taken into account during identification on the FRITZ!Fon.
How can I make sure the phone book is up to date?
The first entry in every tellows phone book shows the validity of the license and date of the last update. The FRITZ!Box is updated once a day.
I also would like to be protected against calls from abroad. Do I have to purchase all score lists?
The score list for the country you selected contains numbers reported by people from that country. This includes national and international numbers. For optimal protection it is not necessary to use lists from several countries. The call block function of the FRITZ!Box also makes it possible to set up a block for entire country codes.
Will I never receive advertising calls again?
Unfortunately no, because call centres are constantly changing their numbers so that blocks can be bypassed. However, regular updates of the lists can substantial improve in the situation.
How do I keep the blacklists up to date if I import them manually?
Simply download the score lists again and import them once a month. So, you always have the currently most active numbers integrated into the spam list. Downloading the lists again is of course free. Important: With the new integration via the tellows CardDAV server the lists are updated automatically every day!
My FRITZ!Box does not have the option to create online phone books by using a CardDAV server. What can I do?
So far, FRITZ!Box with Fritz! OS 7.20 and higher as well as the laboratory version of 7.19 support CardDAV server integration. Check if an update is available for your FRITZ!BOX. If the function is not supported at all you can activate the lists manually by creating the phone books and importing the blacklists. These must be updated manually on a regular basis. You can find the procedure in the instruction for manual import.
Do you have any questions and couldn’t find any help in the FAQs? Then send your request using our support form. We will try to answer you as soon as possible.