HulloMail: 30 days later and I'm still loving it

If you recall I swapped from SpinVox back in late July over to HulloMail. And I haven’t looked back.

I thought that I might miss the semi reliable transcription of SMS from SpinVox. I reckoned that getting the ‘gist’ was good enough — and, for a long time, it was.

But I’m not missing it one bit.

The first change I noticed was immediacy.

I get tip-top immediate notification of voicemails (or missed calls) by text message and email. I was used to having to wait minutes — in some cases 8+ minutes for the people in the SpinVox call centres to do the transcriptions before getting a response.

What was particularly annoying about this situation was if I’d missed a call and the person was leaving a voicemail, I didn’t get ‘access’ to that voicemail until SpinVox’s call centre performed. I only noticed this as a problem when I swapped to HulloMail and found the immediate notification rather satisfying.

I thought it might get rather annoying having to dial-up and listen to voicemails, but HulloMail have made it a piece of simplicity. The text notifications you get for each voicemail contain the direct-dial voicemail number. Call it from the text message and HulloMail automatically recognises your MSISDN phone number and puts you straight into listening mode.

By far the most exciting feature of HulloMail, for me, is the Gmail integration. It’s just total genius.

When you sign-up for the (free) service, HulloMail asks if you’d like Gmail integration. I used my Google Apps details. So now, when anybody calls me, HulloMail looks up my contacts to see if it can find their number.

If it finds the number, boooooom, the emails now read “Voicemail from Ewan MacLeod” and the text message notifications appear to be sent from that contact’s mobile number. So you can immediately write back to them by text or call them by hitting your dial button on the handset.

And then because you’ve got Gmail integration, HulloMail automatically sets up a Gmail label for itself. That’s where all your voicemails appear. Yup, HulloMail actually *sends* you the voicemail audio file.

Here’s an example I got yesterday from my brother, Martin, of Bladewatch:

As you can see, the email from HulloMail looks as though it’s from Martin as it’s done the lookup and found his details in my Gmail contacts. I can even reply to the email.

If I like, I can click on ‘play’ to listen to the MP3-format voicemail. Or forward it to somebody else.

Have a look at HulloMail. It’s free and setup takes about 60-seconds.