[frankied]

I have Rogers Home Phone and online voicemail and am very happy with it (particularly the feature to forward voicemail messages to my email....so I get voicemail messages 'pushed' to my smartphone ). Re your questions, I have not tried filtering calls that way, but the Users Manual says "Allow Calls from My Friends & Family - Callers whose numbers are included in your Friends & Family Privacy List will be connected. All other callers will hear an announcement stating that you are not accepting calls from their number".
This implies people not on your Friends and Family 'whitelist' do not get forwarded to voicemail.
A better option that might meet your needs is a 'unique ringtone' for your Friends and Family contacts, giving you the option to let other callers go to voicemail.
You could do some simple testing to verify the behavior for the scenarios you mention...

Frank

 

[frankied]

Personally, I would not use a 'whitelist' approach for screening calls. You never know when there might be an emergency / urgent call from a number you are not expecting to be called from. And creating / maintaining such a F&F list would be time consuming. The Do Not Call Registry is mostly ineffective unfortunately and I have not found a solution yet to filtering out (for example) "duct cleaning" telemarketing calls that originate on the other side of the planet... they get creative with phone number spoofing that make it look like a local number. I used to get frustrated with such calls, now am more laid back and have fun with them, ex. "I am in Canada - don't you know we all live in Igloos, and don't have ducts?"

Frank