Upgrade your voicemail…
It’s a funny thing that with all the technological improvements that have taken place over the last 30 years there’s one thing that really hasn’t changed much. Good old voicemail. Sure, you can now dial it up remotely and get caller id information, but apart from that it is just plain old vanilla voicemail that records a message and plays it back to you when you want it.
Introducing YouMail:))) a new concept in voicemail. I found this service more or less by accident, browsing a RSS service on T-Mobile rumors and new features. Actually YouMail has nothing to do with T-Mobile, it just happened to be mentioned in the news item I was reading.
So what’s so different about YouMail I hear you asking? Well, the biggest feature is the ability to play different voicemail greetings to different callers. Doesn’t sound like much? Well think about it.One message for the wife and a different one for the mother. Maybe even a ‘disconnected number’ message for the mother-in-law 
You get the idea. What’s more you can change the message whenever you want, create groups of callers that receive a particular message, do whatever works for you. Ok, not bad you say, but is that all? No, it’s not! You can upload your own personalized greetings, choose from 1,000s of pre-recorded ones or even record one live on the site. Oh, and there are a few other nice little things…
When you set up your online account, the system assumes you are setting up voicemail for your mobile phone (it’s not really designed out of the box for landlines - although it does work as mentioned later). The site has an extensive online list of all the different models of phones that are available for each cellphone provider and so it tries to determine who your provider is first and then offers you a choice of phone models. This is important because YouMail can then optimize its service especially for your phone. It knows how your settings are, it knows how text messages work on your phone and a million other things besides. So, you tell the system what you have and then it goes through a ‘handshaking’ procedure with your phone via a text message and lo and behold you are suddenly set up and YouMail recognizes calls from you. All you have to do then is to forward your unanswered calls to YouMail (instead of your default service provider voicemail) and every message will be captured and available to you. You can choose to receive notifications of messages via either text message, email or both. The notification you will receive will indicate the name and phone number of the person, where they are calling from and a link to the message (in the email). You can also opt to have the message attached to the email in the form of a mp3 too! Latly, there is also a beta feature available that will attempt to translate the voice message into text and send it to you via a text message! Neat! If your phone is email capable YouMail will also optimize the email so that it displays in the best possible manner on your phone too. All in all, this is a great service and they are adding features all the time. I definitely recommend that you try it.
I mentioned earlier that the service was designed primarily for cell phones and to that end it works best with them. However, if you can work out how to program your landline phone (or VOIP phone in my case) you can use YouMail for that phone too. It’s all about using the code for “call forwarding - no answer” and redirecting it to YouMail. However, that is a topic for another day and a technical one at that. You can email me if you really need specific instructions.
Anyway, give YouMail a try. You won’t be disappointed. It’s the best thing that’s happened to voicemail in a very long time.
