Comments on: Feature Request: Better Mobile Voicemail

By: Craig Hughes

Craig Hughes — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:54:21 +0000

I’ve been using CallWave for a few months and it’s great (and free). It uses GSM call forwarding to swap your phone’s existing VM for theirs, then sends you GSM-encoded WAV files, plus stores a copy on the web for accessibility when you can’t get your email. I then set up a script on my mail server to recognize the incoming VM emails, re-encode the attachment as MP3 and send it back to my cellphone as an MMS with MP3 attached. I can then listen to my voicemails on my phone, and have them also in my email inbox.
Re-encoding as MP3 also fixes issues where some media players (like, I think quicktime on the mac) don’t like GSM-encoded audio inside a WAV wrapper. MP3s are rarely a problem, and the transcoding doesn’t affect quality much.

By: Michael Buckbee

Michael Buckbee — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:37:58 +0000

I do this right now with my Vonage VoiceMail. They email to my SideKick phone and I can listen to them as WAV files.
I wish they were in MP3 or some smaller format as especially long VoiceMails exceed some size limit for the SideKick.

By: evbart

evbart — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 13:55:07 +0000

I've been using this ( http://www.gotvoice.com/) service for a while, and I've been very pleased. I can take the incoming voicemails, put them into itunes, and then tagging them using the "Grouping" field. Its any easy way to retrieve your voicemails, as well as to pass them off to other people when you want to delegate a task based on that voicemail. Maybe I'll write a post describing the workflow...

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 09:11:01 +0000

I always thought voicemail was *supposed* to be accessed through the phone. But once we got our Lingo box and I realised I could just have it store voicemail on my email server, my perspective changed quickly. Once you get used to receiving voicemails as email attachments, it’s hard to even imagine going back to dialing in. And the great thing about the Lingo system is that the entire dial-in voicemail system still works just the same. So if I’m away from email, I can still call in and retrieve my messages, it’s just that the messages are stored on my server, not theirs, so as soon as I click ‘receive email’ on my computer, the voicemail is in my inbox (actually, in my ‘voicemail’ folder).
Moving on to the important bit, though: i think there is a way around your problem – two, actually.
1. GSM call forwarding
Instead of having your phone forward to voicemail when you don’t answer (or it’s off) just have it forward to a different number. This number could be one where you can receive voicemail messages in your email. This is all standard for GSM systems. Your phone is actually forwarding even in ‘standard’ mode, but it’s forwarding to your voicemail number. Just forward it elsewhere (and this is customisable for a number of different ‘states’, i.e. forward always, forward when busy, forward when no answer, etc.).
2. Simultaneous Ring
On my Lingo phone I can set it to ring simultanously on the home Lingo box or on my mobile. If I pick up my mobile, then it forwards it there. If I pick up neither, then the voicemail can pick up on the Lingo phone (not the mobile) and then I have voicemail as email.