Voicemail Tribulations

A couple of years ago I started looking for a way to get voicemails from my mobile to go into my mailbox. Having the capability to store my voicemails and the limitations on 14 days from my provider was really not acceptable.

I found a service called GotVoice, which basically calls your voicemail number and uses your PIN which you enter when opening your account to log in to the provider voicemail system and retrieve the voicemail. You would then get an e-mail with a link to get to your voicemail.

I stopped using it after several months. Having to visit their site to get my voicemail was not attractive and having GotVoice retrieve my voicemail without the opportunity to listen to it on my phone was also a problem.

While surfing the net recently I came across MessageSling, which basically does the same thing but uses a different approach by using the Conditional Call Forwarding feature cell phones have to redirect voicemail to their service.

By dialing a number code you receive after signing up, the registration of all conditional call forwarding returns success, basically changing the If Busy, the If No Reply and the If Not Reachable conditions.

Its interface resembles Gmail giving the ability to tag voicemails with labels.

On September 1st, MessageSling annouced several new features including “Direct to Message”, allowing you to access each particular message by just dialing a number (no pin or call tree to navigate), as well as Group and Greeting Management allowing to have different greetings for different groups of callers.