Visual Voicemail

I don't use it at all, I use Youmail instead and have my calls routed through that. I highly recommend it.

Nope, sorry, never used it at all. As soon as they pushed it on everyone, I immediately switched to Youmail and never looked back. I believe there is a trial period for using VVM, though, before you have to subscribe to it so perhaps after the trial is over, it shuts off automatically. Not sure, though.

You don't listen to them on Sprint. Sprint voicemail isn't involved at all. My callls are immediately forwarded to a Youmail number without touching Sprint's voicemail. I don't even have Sprint voicemail installed on my phone.

Sprint CS often have no clue what they are talking about when it comes to stuff like this. You don't have to use Sprint VM at all. Like I said, I don't even have it installed on my phone. You just sign up for a Youmail account (or use one of the other alternate voicemail services, I liked Youmail best of the ones I looked into). They will give you a phone number that you route the calls through. To activate it, you just dial *28[number they give you] (make sure you dial the asterisk first).

Its called conditional call forwarding and from that point on, all of your unanswered calls will be redirected to Youmail instead of Sprint VM. If you have any problems, Youmail is extremely helpful and fast with responding to issues. To retrieve your messages, you can either dial the number they give you or you can just use the Android app (which is what I do). You can also have it set up to send you an email and/or text when you get a voicemail. And you can set up various greetings for different groups or individual contacts if you want via the Youmail website. Its very easy to do and they have a ton of free offerings (you can even download greetings - many of which work better as ringtones - to use as ringtones on your phone).

I don't pay for Youmail, I just have the free account since I don't get many calls per month. But they have a variety of packages for those who need more than I do. If you want transcripts, theirs are a buttload more accurate than the crap Sprint does, because they use live human beings to transcribe the messages. That means a short delay of a few minutes, but its worth it if you want something more than transcribed gibberish.

If at some point you want to cancel and go back to using Sprint's voicemail, you just dial *38.

If you do a forum search for Youmail, you'll see that several of us are using it without any problem.

Merged with the existing topic.