Thought this might be of interest to some folks:
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Whoever calls, a personalized message awaits By Irene Sege, Globe Staff | June 27, 2007
Aaron Edelstein's mother in Lexington got a surprise when she called him in New York last fall. "Hi, Mom," his recorded message greeted her. "This is Aaron's voice mail. I might not be picking up because you call me too much."
So much for "No one can take your call right now."
Edelstein is among the thousands of early adopters of YouMail, a personalized voice mail service for cellphones being readied for formal launch later this year by a California start-up. Instead of a one-message-fits-all voice mail prompt, YouMail users can record a personalized prompt for anyone on their contact list. What individualized ring tones did to identify incoming callers, YouMail does to individualize outgoing voice messages.
For Edelstein, a 25-year-old pharmaceutical consultant who moved to Brooklyn two years ago, that means a straightforward message for his landlord and his electrician and his trainer. "Hello. You've reached Aaron Edelstein. Unfortunately, I can't come to the phone." For friends, it's a breezy, higher-pitched "Hi, [insert name of caller here], this is Aaron." His fiancée gets "Hey, Nettie Bear."
In a world where cellphones serve as everything from calendar to camera to fashion accessory, YouMail offers another way for users to marry personality with practicality. "The cellphone is a very personalized device," says industry spokesman Joseph Farren. "It becomes part of us. People customize it and accessorize it and configure it to their own personal tastes."
YouMail appears to be the first voice mail-management system that allows users to customize messages for different callers. The service is free; YouMail expects to make money from advertising on its website, where users retrieve and manage their voice mail.
Here's how it works: Users register on youmail.com, then go to their phones and, with a few key presses, reroute their unanswered calls from their own carrier's voice mail system to YouMail's. To customize a message for a particular caller, the user enters that person's phone number and records a greeting. For those persistent former boyfriends or telemarketers you'd rather not hear from, YouMail offers DitchMail, which blocks unwanted callers from being able to leave a message.
In its latest twist, YouMail this month began allowing users to share the voice messages they've created and rate other users' messages. In addition to YouMail's company-generated prerecorded messages, users also have access to greetings posted by fellow users, such as Homer Simpson saying, "We'll call you back if there isn't a good wrestling match on TV" and Ferris Bueller saying, "How could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?"
Christopher Willis, 37, who manages marketing for a software company in Waltham and lives in the North End, uses YouMail for his personal and business cellphones. His mother and sister hear a humorous message from YouMail's catalog : "The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now."
For his subordinates, Willis is all business. "Someone may get, 'Don't forget to call that company,' " Willis says. "It's not something I would call them and constantly remind them about, but as long as they're calling me, I might as well remind people what they need to be doing."
Willis updates his personalized messages for business associates returning his calls. "They'll call me back eventually," he says, "and I can tell them what I want to tell them without having to talk to them."
Couldn't he simply leave that message on their voice mail when he placed the original call? "I don't know why I didn't think of that," Willis says.
Edelstein's message for his mother, meanwhile, softens by the time she hears the beep. "I love you," it concludes, "and I'll give you a call back as soon as I can."
What does his mother think?
"If I didn't have a good relationship with him, it would hurt my feelings," says Deborah Edelstein.
"The 'love you' at the end negates everything else."
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