Forwarding a Voicemail via Outlook

I’ve been using Exchange 2007 UM for quite a while now. It’s been great. I have had one qualm though: it drives me nuts that when I receive a forwarded VM from a co-worker, I can only open it with Windows Media Player because it’s like a regular e-mail with the WMA attached. It doesn’t have the built in media player control and the "Play on Phone" option is missing. Until now! Here comes the science…

Here’s what a message looks like when it’s forwarded normally:

All I can do is click on the WMA file. Which is okay but I want it to be treated more like a regular VM. I saw a post in the technet forums from one of the MS gurus & he said that this was "by design" – which made me sad. So I goofed around with ideas and finally came up with this one:

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Forward the message, with the original message attached. The keyboard shortcut in outlook is "CTRL+ALT+F".

I tested it out and here’s the result:

Now you see it embedded. Cool! Here’s what happens when you click on the attached VM:

WAAAAY better. Got the "Play on Phone" and the embedded player.

The one minor drawback still is that it doesn’t show up as a "voicemail" when I dial into Outlook Voice Access. But I can live with that for now.