Google Voice forced to shut down SMS voicemail forwarding as carriers fight spam calls

Spam calls are a plague, and carriers are finally starting to fight back, but there’s been an unexpected casualty: Google Voice’s “get voicemail via message” feature. The company is pulling it because the messages are getting flagged as spam, via Brian Krebs on Twitter.

The feature transcribes voicemails from a Google Voice number and texts them to the recipient. But because so many of these voicemails contained automated transcripts of spammy robocalls, those SMS messages were starting to get flagged as spam. In order to avoid further issues, Google is shutting down the feature, which is expected to be completed by August 9th.

Google Voice users won’t be left out completely: they’ll still be able to get their voicemail transcripts via email (assuming they don’t get flagged by a spam filter there) as well as through the usual Google Voice apps and website.