John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> (06/19/91)
Stutter dial tone indicating that voicemail is pending is fine, but it requires that you pick up your phone *for dial tone* periodically. If you pick up the phone *to answer incoming calls* then you never find out that you have mail. I use a PacBell voicemail system (that has some odd quirks but works most of the time), and one thing I'd really like is if it would give me a half-ring when I hang up from an incoming call and there is voicemail. Sort of like the half-rings that GTE phones in Santa Monica used to give in the late '70's anytime an extension phone hung up. This is particularly useful when the voicemail has newly arrived during your current call, due to forward-on-busy. Of course, the morons who answer the voicemail trouble reports swear that outright bugs in the system can't ever get fixed by customer request, let alone having us suggest features to be added. Anybody know a good non-PacBell voicemail service available in Palo Alto? John Gilmore [Moderator's Note: Ameritech Mobile has a nice way of handling this. Whenever you have mail waiting, anytime you use the phone for incoming out outgoing calls you will hear a double set of three short tones just after you press the send button. You can turn this feature on or off in your voicemail account as desired. The default of course is to leave 'notification on'. PAT]