Wireless I.Q. Weblog

Standard Cellphone Voicemail Not Cutting It? Here’s a Better Way.

June 6, 2008 on 2:41 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

If you are heavy cell phone user like I am, you have probably been frustrated by the lack of features with your cell phone provider’s voicemail service. If you are using basic voicemail, greetings are limited to under 30 seconds. Your mailbox can only hold 20 messages and they can can only be kept for 14 days. Many carriers provide an enhanced voicemail service for a monthly fee and you get a little more capacity and longer message length.

YouMail is a great free alternative for voicemail on your cell phone. I tested it out and overall it works very well. Read on for pros and cons, instructions for setup, and other features.

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Ben

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Pros:

• One minute greeting recordings
• Set greetings based on caller
• Custom and prerecorded greetings
• Blocked Numbers cannot leave messages
• Email and text alerts for new messages
• Check messages on the phone or online
• Voice to text voicemail (beta)

Cons

• Messages capped at 2 minutes
• No import feature to get contacts from outlook
• Caller ID notification is dependent on landline CNAM information or your YouMail contacts list, not the phone’s address book

Setup

Setup is pretty easy. Go to www.youmail.com.

Enter your cellphone number.

You will receive a text message with your PIN.

Sign up using your First Name, Last Name, and email address.

Before the next step, you may want to go into your phone’s forwarding settings and record the numbers your phone uses to forward unanswered calls, unavailable, and busy. Save these numbers if you ever want to switch back to your old voicemail.

On your cell phone, dial *004*17142043114# and press send. This sets the number used to forward your calls when unanswered.

Now you have to set your alerts. You can set change these at a later time. I set alerts by text message, which gives me a detailed text with caller information and length of the message left. You can also receive email alerts that allow you to check your voicemail from your computer.

You will then have to program your voicemail key to dial +17142043114. Most phones dial the voicemail by pressing and holding 1. The procedure to change this varies from phone to phone.

After that, you can keep the same PIN they sent you or change it to a new PIN, between 4-12 digits.

You are now done with the initial setup and it will take you to the home screen.

At the home screen, you can view your Voicemails, change Greetings, and edit contacts.

Greetings

By default, YouMail sets a smart greeting which states your name when a caller hears is transferred to your voicemail. If they are stored into your contacts on YouMail, it will also state their name. You can record a greeting from the phone or from your computer. You can record greetings up to one minute in length.

Having web based control lets you change your greeting “on the fly,” helpful if you are about to go into a meeting or step out for lunch.

There are also many prerecorded greetings that you can choose from. I especially like the one that says “I’m sorry, that number is no longer in service. You will have to find a new boyfriend.” There are a lot of free prerecorded greetings.

If you don’t see a greeting you like, you can upload any Mp3 or wav file and use it as a greeting.

A great feature is being able to block numbers from leaving a message. You can set this under the all greetings section.

Contacts

The contacts section allows you to enter in contact information and set specific greetings to play when those numbers are sent to your voicemail. You can also assign contacts to groups and have certain messages play when a member of the group leaves a voicemail.

Other Features

If a caller gets to your voicemail but hangs up, you can still receive a text notification with caller ID information and notifies you that no message was left.

There is currently a beta version of voice to text that attempts to transcribe the message left into a text or email. You can set this for all messages or just for people saved in your contacts list.

You can reply to a voicemail message from your web browser via voice, email, or text message.

If I left out a cool feature, feel free to post it in the comments section.