Activating YouMail on an Unlocked Phone – Help Center

Activate an Unlocked Phone

Unlocked phones can present issues when they still identify data that points to a carrier that is no longer associated with the phone. If the YouMail app detects a former carrier, you may have issues using our automated activation (test call fail) or even dialing the manual activation codes (MMI error).

If you are unable to activate, please first contact your carrier and have them update your IMEI number. This will ensure that your device is always able to communicate with the carrier's network. You can locate the IMEI in two ways:

Dialing the Carrier Code
From the Device Settings

Locating IMEI via Carrier Code

From any device you can dial the following code to gather the IMEI and other information for the device.

Code : *#06#

Locating IMEI via Device Settings

Android

Navigate to Settings and then tap About phone.
Details about your phone number, IMEI, model number, and serial number will be displayed on-screen.

iOS

Go to Settings > General > tap About.
Look for the serial number. You might need to scroll down to find the IMEI/MEID, and ICCID.

Once you have found the IMEI you can provide it to your carrier for update. Once completed, you can retart your device and enable call forwarding from the app (iPhone and Android). You can also find your activation codes here (select the drop-down menu near Edit > Forward to YouMail).

If the activation via your carrier's call forwarding codes continues to fail, then you will need to contact your carrier to have them set up the Conditional Call Forwarding for you internally. Please follow the steps below.

Get your Deposit number
- Listed under Deposit Number here.
Call your current carrier's Support line
Ask the representative to activate call forwarding for busy, no answer, and unavailable for your line to your deposit number.
Before disconnecting with the support team, make sure they give you a test call and that only the missed/unanswered calls are forwarding to your YouMail voicemail

After doing these steps, you will be fully activated with YouMail! Please remember that if the codes do not work, you need to deactivate, or are ever deactivated from YouMail, you will need to contact your carrier again to remove/reactivate this feature.

Notes:

You do not want to enable "regular" call forwarding (aka ALWAYS) as this will send all calls to the number without ringing you first. So, make sure you specify that you want "busy, no answer, and unavailable" (aka CONDITIONAL) call forwarding.

Articles in this section

Locating IMEI via Carrier Code

Locating IMEI via Device Settings