We’ve all agreed that spam calls and robocalls are a menace. One other “casualty” so to speak in the fight against them, aside from our sanity and time, is apparently Google’s “get voicemail via message” feature. They announced that they won’t be supporting this feature anymore since the messages are being flagged as spam by carriers anyway and so are not getting through to users anymore. However, the “get voicemail via email” option is still available if you really need a transcript of the voicemails that you get.
If you’re not familiar with this feature, it transcribes the voicemails that you get from your Google Voice number and then sends them as SMS to you if you want a copy of it. So it’s a good way to keep track of calls that you missed and wa sent directly to your voicemail. However, given the number of robocalls that customers have been receiving from spammy companies, these messages were being flagged as spam by the carriers and so are not actually received.
So given that issue, Google just decided to stop the feature altogether since they cannot ensure that the messages are actually being delivered. By August 9, you won’t be able to send them directly to your SMS. You don’t need to do anything before then as it will be a server-side change. You’ll just find that the “Get voicemail via email” feature will no longer be there. They have actually started removing the feature for some users and completion is expected in a couple of days.
The good news is that you will still be able to forward these transcripts to your email. Go to voice.google.com and at the top right, you’ll see the settings icon. Tap on it and then click on voicemail on the left. Then just turn on the “Get voicemail via email” option. Or the other option would be to just directly listen to your voicemails.
The fight against robocalls is a real thing as it has already reached the legislative stage. The FCC is allowing carriers to have the spam and robocall detection protocols be the default settings instead of being optional. There are also some pending articles and bills in Congress regarding this issue.
