Incidentally, if you find yourself receiving messages from anyone you'd rather not hear from, you can flag those callers as "ditched" which will prevent them from leaving messages in the future. (Ditched callers can also be assigned a custom greeting.)

Accessing YouMail via the mobile site generally works well (from the mobile site you must download messages to play them; you can't stream them the way you can from a PC), though the experience ultimately has a lot to do with the overall ease of use of your device's browser.

You can also call into YouMail by phone to check messages, just as you would with ordinary carrier voice mail. (The initial setup process offers instructions on how to set up the YouMail access number for speed dial on your particular phone.) Since the number is shared, you must enter both your mobile number and PIN to get your messages.

Ad Nauseum?
Like just about all "free" services YouMail is ad-supported, and while there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but be advised that a many of YouMail's ads—each page contains a banner ad at the top, supplemented by another large ad toward the right marginӣaren't exactly subtle. Most of the ones we saw were chock full of bright colors and animation that some might find distracting, and lots of them were of the silly variety-stuff like "take our IQ test" or "Wanna Hookup with a Hottie?".

Although YouMail doesn't charge except for custom greetings, you need to be mindful of some things when using the service to avoid unexpected costs from your carrier. First, if you opt for message notification via text messaging, be sure to have a plan that includes a lot of it, lest you be dinged for 15 or 20 cents each time you receive a notification. Second, accessing carrier-based voice mail is a free call, calling your YouMail number (it's in the 714 area code) will use up minutes, or even trigger long-distance charges depending on your plan.

Voice to Text
Also, YouMail offers a transcription feature that costs between $3.99 and $17.99 per month, depending on what service level you choose Transcription Preview plans ranging from $3.99 to $9.99 a month and converts 20 words of each voicemail to text. While Transcription Complete plans range from $6.99 to $17.99 a month. They transcribe entire voicemails.

We used the transcription service several times while it was in beta (it just went gold) and it worked remarkably well, provided the caller speaks clearly when leaving a message. YouMail lets you append your outgoing messages with a canned reminder to speak slowly and deliberately.

Transcribed messages can be included in e-mail or text notifications, and for the latter it can be broken up into multiple texts to get around size limitations.

Caveats notwithstanding, YouMail can be an immensely useful service that makes your mobile voice mail extremely powerful and flexible. Unless you're with Sprint, it's definitely worth a close look.