YouMail - Voicemail will never be the same again! yay!
It’s like someone read my mind! (or my rants).
What I hate about my cell phone’s voice mail service: it sucks (well let me back up a few steps and tell you why I hate my cell phone’s voice mail service, and why I just fell in love with YouMail)…
I hate my cell phone’s voice mail service because:
- it takes toooooo long to get my voice mail messages. That annoying automated lady they use talks way too slow (I’m sure they do this on purpose so you use up more airtime minutes.
- if I skipped a bunch of voice mail messages and now want to listen to the latest message that just came in, I have to re-listen or re-skip all the other messages first before I get to the new one.
- I tend to skip or save a lot of old voice mail messages, and often forget to go and delete old ones so my mailbox ends up getting full and new callers can’t leave messages (and I have now way of knowing this unless I call myself and realize I can’t leave myself a message!)
- I use my computer way more than my phone, and I’d rather just click a button to hear my voice mail than have to call my phone, press a bunch of buttons, etc.
Now, here is why I just fell in love with this free service called YouMail.
At it’s most basic level, it’s a replacement for your voice mail service. Using simple instructions from YouMail, you basically set up your phone so that if you don’t answer a call, it goes to voice mail (but their voice mail system, not your cell phone provider)
Now, one neat thing about YouMail is that you can check your voice mail messages in two different ways. One is the usual way of using your phone to call and get your messages (except again with easy instructions you will set a different speed-dial number to get your messages from).
The other way is that you can set it up to get an email notification whenever you have a new voice message, and you can just click the link in the email to hear your new voice mail message (it logs you into your YouMail account)
You can easily play, delete, and save voice mail messages from your online account. And, you can download voice mail messages, email them to a friend, etc.
Now, being able to check my voice mail from the web is great, and for just this feature alone I would switch to YouMail. But it gets even better…
YouMail explains this best on their web site and even has some cute videos (spin offs of the Mac vs. Windows commercials), but in short… you can set up contacts in your YouMail account. For example, you can set your boyfriend/girlfriend or whatever as a ‘contact’, and when they call you, if you don’t answer and they get your voice mail, you can set it up so they get a custom voice mail message!
You can either create your own outgoing message or use one of the hundreds of pre-recorded messages on YouMail’s web site.
There are also pre-recorded messages for Ditchmail, which is a great way to handle telemarketers, or people who call from blocked/private or unknown numbers. Some messages are the standard “this phone does not accept blocked callers” type messages, but you can also do some fun stuff, such as use fake error messages for these types of calls (and YouMail has plenty to choose from as well)
Anyone not set up as a ‘contact’ will just get whatever you set as your default outgoing message.
Anyway, check it out for yourself at http://www.youmail.com
