This post was published 1 year 4 months 21 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

I saw a link about this over at smartphonethoughts.com but there wasn’t much info about how it really worked, so I decided to run a few tests of my own.

YouMail is a visual voicemail service. What that means is that once you set up an account,  you have web access to your voicemail and you get extra, advanced voice mail options, with their service.

I have to admit, messing with the voicemail system already set up on my phone made me a little nervous. The last thing I wanted to do was goof that up and start missing messages. Thankfully, so far, they seem to be coming in just fine.

YouMail claimed that the set up would only take 2 minutes, and I think they were right. It was an easy account set up, and then they give you the specific phone code to enter (for your phone model) and I think what it does is sets forwarding on your messages to go to their system and not your provider’s system. In the help file there is info about how to cancel your account and restore your old voice mail routing.

Once messages are routed to their system, you have lots of options:

Listen to messages online, set up sms alerts for when you get calls, set up mp3 greetings. Neat.

The coolest feature to me so far though is their transcription beta. It transcodes voicemail messages and delivers them as text messages, so you can get the idea about your message, without calling voicemail. That seems very useful to me. It doesn’t always nail it exactly, but close enough. Hey, it’s still beta. Anyway, I am usually patient about those kinds of things and try to have a pragmatic outlook. You buy that?

Also, you can access all the web features at m.youmail.com. Lots of options.

Best part about the whole thing… IT"S FREE! FREE I TELL YOU!

I know there are other services out there that do this (our office has Exchange email alerts for voice mail), but for your average consumer, so far, this service seems great to me.

I will follow up in a week and let you all know how it holds up.

Jay Donovan (50 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook