Avoiding the cost of T-Mobile UK Voicemail – Part One

I’ve been a T-Mobile UK customer for donkeys years since when it was One2One. In fact until a few months ago when I finally retired my GSM SIM card and rather late joined the 3G Smart Phone party (as opposed to the LG KS360 2.5G ‘blackberry style pay as you go phone for teenagers who can’t afford a blackberry’) my phone display still showed ‘One2One’ as the operator. Now I’m long past a teenager and the specifics of the handsets in questions are an irrelevant detour on the way to the subject of these blog posts.

Now ‘back in the day’, now it’s probably no longer cool to use this phrase, but never mind, back in the day listening to your voice mail messages would be free. However for many many years T-Mobile have charged you to listen to your voicemail.

You could pretend you were a Sunday Newspaper journalist and dial your own phone from another cheaper line and insert the pin number (which of course you had changed from the default) and listen to your messages.

Now paying 12p a minute was a minor inconvenience when I was a ‘Pay as you go’ customer. But when I switched to a pay monthly contract (on a SIM Only deal on the afore mentioned LG device) I find that listening to voicemail is not included as part of your inclusive minutes. I’m paying 12p a minute to listen to my voicemail no matter what.

Therefore the aim is to find a way to avoid this, so the obvious answer is a voicemail to email service, but if only life was that simple.

I purchased a nice 03 number from my normal supplier of such services, Flextel, this cost me a couple of quid for the number, plus a quid top up of ‘call credit’. I wouldn’t be using any of this as I configured the number as voicemail.

I set my call diversion on my phone to my new 03 number. When a message us left on the voicemail Flextel email me the message as an email attachment, which I can then listen to on my phone at no cost, the files are tiny as not to worry my “acceptable use” none specfic data allowance.

This threw up a problem. The email attachment is a ulaw formatted wav file. The native android media player doesn’t recognise this codec.

This is fixed with a 99p app called WavPlayer.

So for the price of a pint down the pub there’s no paying 12p a minute to listen to voicemail……..or THAT’S what I thought until I examined my phone bill……. Wait for part two to find out the next T Mobile plan feature I hadn’t spotted….