VoiceMail Attachment Does Not Play on Windows Mobile/Smartphone

Symptom:

You have a voice mail system that can send out .WAV files as email attachments. The attachments play properly on Windows and Mac desktop computers (such as Windows Media Player), but if you try to play it with Windows Mobile or Windows Smartphone editions, you get "Invalid Format" error and the sound does not play.

Issue:

It is very likely that your voice mail system encodes the WAV file requiring a special CODEC. For example, I have a SpeakEasy VoIP service and this service (and great many of other VoiceMail system vendors) encode the WAV file using IMA ADPCM format (i.e., not all the WAV files are coded the same, the most basic one is the PCM, that will and do play on Windows mobile devices out of the box.)

Fix:

Install a third party sound player that can decode and play WAV files in IMA ADPCM format.
One such that I have found so far is PocketPlayer (30 day demo, approximately $20.00 purchase) and it worked fine with the SpeakEasy voice mail attachments. http://conduits.com/download_cabs.asp?product=Pocket+Player+3.51

So far I have not found any specifics from Microsoft web site about how you could provide a CODEC plug-in, in its Media Player. In fact Microsoft does not distribute Windows Media Player for Pocket PCs. That's left up to the device manufacturer. This probably has something to do with giving the manufacturer the ability to cripple some of the features they don't want for their users to have.