Hack71.Automatically Forward Voicemail

Hack 71. Automatically Forward Voicemail

Have all incoming voicemail forwarded to an email address of your choice as soon as it arrives.

Works with: Windows version of Skype.

This is one of those features you feel sure should be built into Skype, but isn't. Until it is, you'll need a Skype add-on to do the job, and for automatically forwarding all your voicemail to an email address, there is no better tool than Pamela Professional (17.50, about $22, from http://www.pamela-systems.com/).

Skype uses a proprietary and undocumented (outside of Skype, at least) format for its voicemail audio files, which have a .dat file extension and can normally be found in this folder: C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Skype\Skypename\voicemail, where Username is the name used to log on to the machine and Skypename is the name used to log on to Skype. This is unfortunate, as it means you cannot easily listen to, archive, or exchange Skype voicemail outside of Skype.

Setting up voicemail forwarding in Pamela is simplicity itself. Select Pamela Tools Options Email forwarding, and set up how, and to what email address, you want your voicemail forwarded (see Figure 8-1).

Figure 8-1. Setting up voicemail forwarding using Pamela

Pamela forwards your voicemail as .wav files, which you can play easily by opening them (in your default playback application for .wav files) from directly within the received email (see Figure 8-2), or by saving them to disk for later. Just right-click on the .wav file attachment and choose Open or Save As….

Pamela uses a format for the name of the attached voicemail audio file that tells you a good deal about who left you voicemail, and when. Its format is msg_skypename_dd_mmm_yyyy_hh_mm_ss.wav, where skypename is the name of the Skype user who left the voicemail, dd_mm_yyyy is the date on which the voicemail was left, and hh_mm_ss is the time at which the voicemail was left.

Figure 8-2. Playing voicemail (in this case, using RealPlayer) forwarded by Pamela, directly from the email message