I was trying to get voicemail working in the (Google) phone app, as well as visual voicemail, and realized that it wouldn't connect and download the messages over my VPN, which is set to always on and block connections without VPN. I have a few questions about this:
1) Is there any way to get it to work, without changing the VPN settings?
2) The obvious workaround is to use split tunneling. But this requires me not only to exclude the phone app from the VPN tunnel, but also to disable the "block connections without VPN" setting, in the genereal settings for my VPN.
2a) What are the risks of disabling "block connections without VPN"? Doesn't this mean if the VPN drops for some reason, all connections will start going over the open internet? Also at startup, the VPN is not connected, until the phone is unlocked, so couldn't some data leaks happen then?
2b) What are the risks of excluding the (Google) phone app from the VPN tunnel? I don't really care if it connects to my cell service, to retrieve voicemails. But what other connections might it be making?
Thanks for any feedback on this.