The story
The YouMail brand visual voicemail software was first developed, trademarked, and brought to market in 2006 by communications software developer Zeacom, which is based in Auckland, New Zealand. The service originally started out as a multi-platform visual voicemail solution, with the novel feature of personal greetings, where users could create different greetings for callers based on their incoming caller ID. Helping combat robocalls their service replaces an ordinary voicemail; it instead plays three notes that create the impression of a non-working number to prevent robocalls from coming in.
YouMail was spun off as a standalone service in 2007. In November 2007, YouMail announced a partnership with Salient Media, to offer a combination of free and subscription-based comedic voicemail greetings.
In 2009, the company saw its first success, with visual voicemail for BlackBerry. It also launched a free iPhone app, which was considered a loss leader for its voicemail transcription services.
In 2010, the company announced that YouMail was the standard voicemail that comes with all mobile phones from IMMIX Wireless in Pennsylvania, Cellular One in eastern Central Illinois, Blue Wireless in New York, iSmart Mobile in Montana, VoicePulse in New Jersey, and Windy City Cellular in Adak, Alaska.
In 2011, the company launched WhoAreYou, an app for Android that provides users with caller's names, and gives them the ability to add specific numbers to a block list, screening out robocalls and telemarketers in the process.
By 2012, the company reported over 2.5 million registered users of its service. The company also announced they stopped supporting new updates for BlackBerry devices.
In November 2015, the company launched the YouMail Robocall Index, to track legal and illegal robocall traffic across the US. The YouMail Robocall Index is a unique online portal which provides a monthly estimate of the volumes and types of robocalls nationwide, and for each specific state, city and area code. The initial report indicated at that time that 1 out of every 6 calls received in the US was generated by a machine.
The ongoing monthly estimate is created by extrapolating from the behavior of the billions of calls that YouMail has managed for its users. YouMail identifies problematic numbers through its audio fingerprinting technology and analysis of calling patterns, along with direct consumer feedback. In turn, the Index's statistics have been regularly cited by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), consumer advocates and many other groups as the national source for robocalling data trends.
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YouMail won the American Business Awards' Gold Stevie Award for Technical Innovation of the Year, and the YouMail app was named the nation's best robocall-blocking solution in a competition organized by Geoffrey Fowler of The Washington Post.
From Wikipedia’s article on Youmail, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5