Free Voicemail and Phone Number

                You can obtain a free, valid telephone number whenever you want.  These services allow people to call your free number and leave voicemails; some of these will allow the calls to be forward to another telephone number you might have.  The purpose of this is to avoid giving out sensitive personal information and to separate personal from non-personal calls.

 
The new Google Voice, formally Grandcentral.  The most powerful free voicemail service now also offers SMS messaging and international calling.

 

 

  1. GrandCentral (Google Voice) – (http://www.grandcentral.com/)  This Google-owned website is easily the best free voicemail service on the internet today.  It allows you to store thousands of voicemails, gives caller statistics, and allows you to forward calls to another number.  It is currently being transitioned to Google Voice, which will also add features such as call transcripts, SMS messaging, international calling, and conference calling.  The site also allows you to choose a local area code.  All for free.  The downside is you have to be invited to the service; you can enter your name and email on the site, and you will usually be sent an invitation.  This might be currently suspended, however, since they are in the process of the upgrade.  With that being said, sign up anyway. 

  2. YouMail – (http://www.youmail.com/)  An excellent service that provides you with free voicemail for your cell phone, eliminating the need to pay for this through your cellular provider.  Features include visual voicemail lists, voice-to-text technology, voicemail saving, blocking callers, and having your voicemail greet your callers by name.  There is a great feature called DitchMail where a caller is read a message and then the call is dropped.  Works with most cell phones and carriers.  There is now a Blackberry application to use all of these features from you phone. 

  3. Laser Voice Mail – (http://www.laservoicemail.com/)  A standard, free voicemail service where you call your number to retrieve and delete messages.  Unfortunately, you have to call a toll-free number during business hours to sign up, and you may be unable to get a local number.

  4. K7 Unified Messaging – (http://www.k7.net/)  This site can be used as a voicemail or fax number.  Unfortunately, there may be a fee per minute to send faxes, but I don’t think there is one to receive them.  All numbers are given a 206 (Seattle, WA) area code, so no local numbers.  You can hold 20 messages at one time.

  5. Callinbox – (http://www.callinbox.com/) This site will give you a free voicemail-to-email phone number from the United Kingdom.  The only catch is that you have to call their UK phone number up to confirm the account, which could cost money.  It is cool to have a United Kingdom phone number, especially for UK freebies.

  6. CallVibe – (http://www.callvibe.com/)  This service give you a free voicemail number by using a public switched telephone network (PTSN).  This allows for call conferencing and party lines.  They voicemail is anonymous; you can check your voicemails by calling your number or by downloading their software client.

 

 

 

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