The Effective CIO

Tools That Work: YouMail April 28, 2008

Every so often, some enterprising firm delivers a new way of handling an old problem that is fun, easy, and clever.  YouMail is exactly that: fun, easy, clever voice mail for your cell phone that absolutely blows away any other personal voice mail service I’ve seen.

At the most basic level, YouMail is a free replacement for whatever voice mail your carrier provides for your cell phone.  Getting started is easy: go to www.youmail.com, register, provide your cell phone info (number, carrier, and model), and follow the easy online instructions to switch your phone to the service.  Fret not: if you really don’t like it, they’ll show you how to switch back.

After this two minute process, you’ll have a good replacement for your existing voice mail.  Now you can begin exploring all the neat features of YouMail:

• Begin by adding your contacts to YouMail.  Record a custom personal greeting for each contact, using your phone or their web interface.  When that person calls, they get a personal greeting.  Set up specific greetings for your spouse, kids, coworkers, and boss.
• Assign your contacts to groups.  Record a greeting for each group.  This is very effective: your business contacts get a formal business greeting, while your family and friends get a more casual greeting.
• Don’t have the time to record all those greetings?  Turn on Smart Greetings, and YouMail will address each caller by their first name using a generic greeting.
• Turn on text and email notifications.  By default, YouMail will continue to manage the voice mail indicator on your phone, notifying you when a message is waiting.  It can also send you an email or a text message.  Best of all: the email has the audio file attached to it, so you can listen to your messages through your email.  That’s right: Unified Messaging for free on your cell phone!
• Turn on transcription.  If you wish, YouMail will include a transcription of the message in the email or text message.  This feature is in beta and either works really well or delivers hilariously wrong transcriptions.
• Mark bothersome callers for “DitchMail:” YouMail intercepts their call, plays a message, and hangs up without allowing them to leave a message.
• Use DitchMail for callers who block their caller ID.
• Manage, review, and archive your voice mail through YouMail’s nicely-designed web site.  Forward voice mails to others via email and send text messages to callers for free from the YouMail web interface.
• Use any of several thousand silly greetings for your callers.  Not particularly professional, but certainly amusing.  Hearkens back to the early 80s when people would buy “celebrity message” tapes to record on their answering machines at home.
• Find out who called but didn’t leave a message when your phone was off.  YouMail reports every call you receive, even if the caller leaves no message or hangs up before they hear the beep.  Nips those “I tried to call but you weren’t there” excuses in the bud.

What doesn’t it do?  I have only one quibble with YouMail: you cannot bulk upload your contacts.  Typing in lots of contacts is simply too hard.  I started by loading in my most common contacts, and I add new callers the first time they show up in my call log.  In keeping with my request for better site integration, I’d like YouMail to grab all my contacts from Plaxo and keep them in sync.

YouMail is the perfect blend of useful fun, all for free.  You can use it to better manage your professional voice mail and still have fun with family and friends.  Take a moment to check it out; it will be five minutes well-invested.