A common question these days is: “Will YouMail still work if I forward my home/office phone to my cell phone?”
The answer is “yes, but you need a paid version of YouMail.”
The way YouMail works is this: someone calls you, and if you don’t answer, your wireless carrier forwards the call to our “shared access number”, telling us the number that was originally called (your “OCN”, in telephone jargon). We then use that OCN to find your mailbox.
Normally that’s fine – they call your cell, and we get your cell number.
The problem is when you forward another number to your cell first, like your home or office. At that point the OCN is your home number – and YouMail won’t have an account with that number, and will say “I can’t find a mailbox for this caller”.
It turns out there are two ways to fix the problem:
- Get a personal access number, and forward your missed call phone calls to it. Since only you are forwarding to that number, YouMail knows that any call that comes in for you, regardless of how it got there. This is the quick and dirty solution.
- Explicitly tell YouMail you want to use it with multiple lines. That way YouMail knows that there are calls coming into multiple lines going into your mailbox. This solution is best if you also want to forward your home number directly to YouMail at times.
We’re always looking for better solutions, but this is as good as it gets for now.