YouMail: Product Review www.youmail.com
Background: For months I was receiving harassing phone calls and voicemails from an unknown person. I tried everything I could to ignore the problem, even hired a Private Investigator to look into it things were getting so bad, until I recently discovered my voicemail account with Cingular had been compromised. A friend of mine received a forwarded voicemail supposedly from me at 4am one morning. I was not awake and this really confused me. Since this person elected to no longer remain my friend I was ticked off. I searched forums, googled voicemail hacking, bugged Cingular, etc.. in order to find out what was going on. My research taught me that Cingular’s voicemail system is probably the most unsecure system out there. Sprint/Nextel users voicemail accounts are tied directly to thier phones ESN (serial number) and passwords are enabled by default. Cingular however ties its voicemail to Caller ID and you have to enable voicemail passwords in the system yourself. My mistake was that I enabled the password protection on my phone but not the voicemail system.
VoiceMail Hacking
My voicemail had been hacked and this is how they probably did it. Have you ever called lets say Best Buy at 1-800-BESTBUY? That number is 1-800-237-8289. Now Best Buy pays the phone company a lot of money to be able to use that particular number and they want everyone to use it when they call a customer service center. Now Best Buy probably has 2000 or so phones in their customer service department and they all can’t have the same number. So the phone company sells a service called “Trunking” which routes all calls to 1-800-BESTBUY to those 2000 numbers. Follow me so far?
Every customer service phone line has its own number but Best Buy is paying for you to call that one number. It is easier on everyone. Now when anyone from one of those 2000 customer service number calls out to you have you ever noticed that the caller id always says 1-800-237-8289 and not the private number to that line the rep has to give you that personally. Well part of trunking is that Best Buy has bought the ability to run out going calls through a switchboard that assigns a caller id to the out going call. So Best Buy can make their number appear regardless of what number is really calling. Seems reasonable they pay alot of advertising dollars to drive that number into your head. Most government and 911 systems work the same way. Try it out.
Well here is the flip side of “Trunking”. Debt Collectors, Salesmen, Private Investigators, etc… anyone who wants to confuse you with the money to pay the huge cost of trunking can manipulate their Caller ID. Cingular’s security hole allows the the Debt Collector lets say to not only get you to answer the phone because you think it is work or mom calling. If you have not enabled the voicemail password protection on your voicemail account and they call you using your own number as the caller id then they are in regardless of the password. I asked the Cingular Tech Support about this today and they swore it was impossible. If you go to www.howardforums.com you will quickly see it is.
The Solution
Youmail is a free web based voicemail service that I am absolutely in love with. It offers secure voicemail, voicemail archiving, personalized greetings, call rejection services and what is really nice it will send a copy of your voicemail messages marked with sender/date/time to your own email account and send you a text message as well. Set up is very easy with incredibly simply step by step instructions that even I could follow.
Secure Voicemail: The service is web based so your password is off of the Cell service that you presently use and can be much more intricate than the pure number based ones on most providers.
Voicemail Archiving: Youmail will save your voicemails forever. Unlike the $6 a month enhanced service that Cingular offers which only saves voicemails for a maximum of 21 days. The best part of this feature is you have the option of having a name/number/date/time stamped copy of your voicemails sent to your own email account which can be kept forever. Best of all the date/time/number stamp adds serious evidencuary value in a court case.
Personalized Greetings: Youmail allows you to record a personal greeting to each individual who calls you. So when your mom calls she can hear “Hi Mom, I can not answer right now I will call you back. Leave a message” instead of the generic greetings we all record or the dead air I recorded on mine to keep my number from going out. Be prepared for the people you know to freak out when your voicemail calls them by name. Also you can put your favorite schools fight song as their personal greeting if they are fans of another school.
Call Rejection: Youmail offers the option to “Ditch” calls. Essentially if your ex is calling and harassing you there is an option to reject any voicemails from that number and the service simply hangs up on them.
Voicemail Notification: In the set up process you have an option to have Youmail send your phone a text message whenever you get a voicemail.
Set Up: You mail has a simple but somewhat lengthy process to set up your new voicemail box. Essentially the service switches the number your phone calls to check voicemail to another number that is off of the Cingular system. The service recognizes your number from your phones serial number and not caller id which is something cingular should have implemented years ago. The instructions are simply written and easy to follow with video tutorials.
Drawbacks:
You will not be able to check your voicemail from someone elses phone but the emailed copies and added security are worth it to me these days.
Also the number Youmail uses to check your voicemail is long distance so make sure you have a Nationwide Free Long Distance plan for your cell phone.
You will have to change the speed dial key on your phone to the number Youmail gives you. I my case I press and hold down the number 1 to check my cingular voicemail and use the number 4 to check my Youmail.
The online system you can log into to check your messages from the internet is Java based and requires you to download and install the latest version on your computer. So if your work computer network is like mine and does not allow you to download and install programs you won’t be able to use youmail at work. So just use your personal account from home instead.
Overall I find Youmail to be an excellent free service which is hands down better than the pay services I have tried. I highly recommend any Cingular customer or victim of harassing phone calls to switch.
