A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my search for better voice mail. That search began with a new service called YouMail. It had all the features I was looking for, like email notification, and even a few I didn't know I wanted, like customizable greetings based upon caller ID. But I had some problems with there web-app and moved on to try another voice mail service.

Well, on Monday, I received a voice mail from a well spoken gentleman who said his name was Ken, one of YouMail's co-founders, and that he wanted to talk to me about my experience and why I switched away from YouMail.

I must admit that I was surprised and impressed that someone would go out of their way to attempt to contact me for what I considered a simply blog post chronicling my journey through this new digital frontier of communication we find ourselves in.

Today I got a chance to call Ken back.

Ken Brickley is a co-founder and vice-president of marketing for YouMail. He explained that he regularly searches the WWW for mentions of YouMail. He didn't recall for sure where he stumbled upon my blog but called as a result of reading my posts.

I explained that everything worked well for me except that the web-app gave me some trouble and I moved on as a result of that. It was a simple as that. In my case, my laptop is given to me by my job and is still running Mac OS 10.3.9. And that seems to be the issue.

YouMail is Mac friendly on Mac OS 10.4.8 and later versions, with the latest Java updates installed. With an earlier version of the Mac OS, you would be limited in recording and playback of messages via the website, although users can still manage their account via the telephone in this scenario.

Which is exactly the trouble I was having. But what am I to do? Well, YouMail may have an interesting development coming our way. No timetable or details were given but Ken suggested that YouMail may be coming out with a flash based web-app in the future.

With any luck for me it will be soon. But only time will tell.

It was a nice chat. I plan to switch my voice mail back to YouMail and access the web-app from my Windows machine for a while. Just to give it and Ken another chance.

Thanks Mr. Brickley for the phone call. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I'll be sure to let you know how my experience goes if and when YouMail's update is released. And if you need a beta tester then let me know.