Using Yahoo! Phone In
| Getting a Phone Number | Receiving a Phone In Call | Putting a Call on Hold | Managing Your Phone In Account |
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Getting a Phone Number for Your Yahoo! ID
Now you can receive phone calls from regular phones and mobile phones right on your PC—on any PC as a matter of fact, as long as the PC has Yahoo! Messenger 7 or higher installed and you're connected to the Internet. Oh, and you need to get a phone number through the Yahoo! Phone In service and hand it out to your friends. The phone number follows your Yahoo! ID around, so whenever you're signed into Yahoo! Messenger and no matter where you are on the Internet, your friends can call you. And if you aren't signed in, or don't want to take the call, your friends can leave voice messages that you can listen to through Messenger's Voice Messages service. Yahoo! Phone In is a subscription-based premium service. To learn more, go to the Yahoo! Voice web site.
It's easy to get a Phone In number. In fact, you can get a number for almost any place that works for you; you don't even need to live there. Let's say your family lives in Boston and you're in San Francisco. You can get a Phone In number with a Boston area code so that when your family calls you on your PC, it's a local call for them. To top it off, you can get unlimited numbers assigned to your ID. (Each number carries its own monthly fee and the fee is the same for each number.)
Here's How
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While signed into Messenger, click the Phone In link in the box below your Messenger List.
The Yahoo! Voice web site opens.
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Follow the online instructions to sign up for Yahoo! Phone In.
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To update your Messenger interface and to start receiving Phone In calls, sign out of and back in to Messenger.
After signing in to Messenger, notice that your new Phone In number appears in the box below your Messenger List.
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To add more phone numbers, click the Phone In number in the box below your Messenger List to open your Yahoo! Phone In online account in a web browser.
Be sure to sign out of and back in to Messenger so that your friends can receive calls on your new number.
What's Next
The Yahoo! Voice category preference lets you select a number to display in the My Caller ID Phone Number section. The selected number is the number others see when you call them using Messenger's Yahoo! Phone Out feature (if their phone system supports caller ID).
Forgotten what your Phone In numbers are? Just hold the cursor over the number displayed below your Messenger List and a complete list of your numbers appears.
Words to Know
- Messenger List: a list of coworkers, friends, family, and associates who also use Yahoo! Messenger.
- Yahoo! ID: the name by which a person is known to all Yahoo! networks.
- Yahoo! Phone In: a premium, subscription-based service of Yahoo! Voice that attaches a phone number to your Yahoo! ID so that you can receive phone calls to your computer through Messenger.
- Yahoo! Phone Out: a pre-paid Yahoo! Voice account that allows you to make calls using Messenger from your computer to any regular phone or mobile phone in over 30 countries.