Voicemail Callback Scams

At YouMail, we believe that no one should ever have to pay to block robocalls! That’s why we don’t charge – and don’t want to ever charge – for the free YouMail robocall blocking app.  In fact, our app works by replacing mobile voicemail with our award-winning visual voicemail service that not only blocks robocalls, but also provides a huge voicemail inbox, as well as cloud-based access to voicemail on your computer. 

So with YouMail, you get a lot for free.

However, to offer all those features for free, we have to keep our costs very low, and we’ve done a lot of work to make that happen – including building our own telephony platform from scratch!

The challenge is that sometimes we have to depend on the outside world. And as you know, the outside world doesn’t always like to offer things for free.   

For example, there are two popular features we built using SMS, used by about 20-25% of our users.  One is providing alerts of new messages by SMS, which allows you to be notified of new voicemails even when you don’t have a good data connection. The other is to automatically reply to callers by SMS, providing a brief message to them about when you might be available next, for example, so they know they didn’t go into a voicemail black hole.

We implemented these features using the e-mail to text gateway the carriers provided so that we wouldn’t be charged for sending those texts. No cost to us meant no cost to users. 

However, much to our disappointment, wireless carriers have recently changed things so that texts can no longer be reliably sent that way.  In short, we send them out, but the carriers stop them from ever making it to the targets. 

On top of that, they’ve added a bunch of charges to the other ways to send those texts (like from a 1-800 number).  The costs are now so high that keeping these features in the free service threatens our ability to keep offering the rest of our service for free.

So we’ve made a hard choice.

We decided to make SMS alerts and auto-reply premium features so we can keep offering the YouMail Robocall Blocking and other visual voicemail services for free.   

Don’t worry; this isn’t the first sign that the free service is going to vanish.  It’s not. It’s just a sign that carriers are changing things up and sometimes in reaction we have to twiddle our service so that we can keep offering it for free.

Even though most of our competitors are charging for robocall blocking, we’ll keep offering the best robocall blocking app for free. Since nearly 50% of robocalls are scams or illegal telemarketing, it’s necessary for consumers to have the best robocall protection available to them at no cost.

And as our users know, when you talk about the best robocall protection, you’re talking about YouMail. Try it out and see for yourself!


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12 thoughts on “When Bad Things Happen to Free Services

  1. Please help!
    I deleted YouMail app because it was sending my voicemails to my email and that doesn’t work for me.
    Like I said my voicemail is continuing to go to my email. Please advise. I also tried to unsubscribe but it will not recognize my email.
    S.O.S!!!!!

    1. Hello Deborah! Thank you for your question.

      First, if you didn’t like the email notifications while you used the app, you can easily turn them off in YouMail’s notifications settings.

      If you’d still like to deactivate and return to your carrier, you just needed to hit “return to carrier” in the app (this dials the deactivation codes to forward your calls back to your carrier). If you’ve already uninstalled, just go to the following link to find your carrier-specific deactivation code to dial: http://go.youmail.com/deactivate.

    1. Oh no! We’re sorry to hear that, Tina. Would you be willing to clarify how we’re disappointing you? We definitely want to learn more to either resolve the issue for you, or fix/improve it for future users. Please Live Chat us at support.youmail.com and reference this review. Hope to hear from you!

  2. I use youmail and like it. I also use Should I Answer . They seem compatible and Youmail offers services that Should I Answer isn’t designed for. I have seen a marked decrease in robo calls when I use those apps. Love the idea of the newsletter and read all of it except about IOS ( have android)

    1. Thank you for your testimonial, Tom! We also so appreciate your excitement for our newsletter. If you ever have things you’d like to see in the newsletter, don’t hesitate to let us know. We’ll make sure to include some Android-specific tips in future newsletters as well!

  3. I like the app and have been using for sometime. I deactivated when I had to restore my phone do factory default. I am trying to get your app again but it is not available in the Google store. Where did your app go? Are you still in business? Searched the internet and could not find any recent news.

    1. Thank you for your question and for your patience, Aaron! We had received notice that Google removed our app from the store as it didn’t believe it was a spam blocker app and were in the process of appealing for almost 2 weeks. As of today, our appeal has been approved and our app should be back in the Play Store soon.

      Feel free to check out our blog on this for more info: https://blog.youmail.com/?p=1327&preview=true&_thumbnail_id=1324. You can also Live Chat us at support.youmail.com with any questions.

  4. Galaxy J7 crown. The youmail app was using 60%+ of my cpu by itself. Rebooting my phone and killing the app were ineffective… the app kept restarting.

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