Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) bits that are conventionally used for error detection have recently found a new application in UMTS WCDMA standard (specifically, "blind transport format detection") for message length detection of variable-length message communications. Co-worked with the inner convolutional code, it was demonstrated that the CRC bits can simultaneously detect the receiver-unaware length of a message block without much degradation in its error detection capability. In this work, we introduce two novel decoding strategies for joint decoding of the convolutional and the CRC code. Two previous strategies are also quoted for comparison. Simulation results on their error performance and computational complexity are given.