You Need to Setup a New Voice Mail Message & Password when you get a new cell phone with AT&T or You Will Soon Receive Error Messages for the Voice Mail Password
After My T Mobile Experiment Failed Miserably I Switched Back To AT&T
A few weeks after switching my new iPhone 6+ back to AT&T, and adding my new iPhone back onto our existing family share plan, while maintaining the same fee structure…I began to receive messages on it telling me that my Voice Mail Password was incorrect.
But I’d never setup or entered a Voice Mail password!
I ended up calling AT&T and this is what they told me:
AT&T has a new Voice Mail system. Right now you are only obligated to set this up when you switch to a new cell phone. But who knows, this may change in the future.
When you first setup your phone you are asked to enter a Voice Mail password and create a custom message. If you fail to do this, after a period of time (which in my case was about a month) you will start receiving the error message telling you that your Voice Mail password is incorrect.
You will then need to call AT&T to reset the password. This happens so often that they have an automated menu and help messages for it. But if the automated menu doesn’t address you’re needs, you have the option of speaking to a customer service person. I chose to do this, and he reset my password, then explained to me how I could manage this in the future myself.
How To Manage The Settings For Voice Mail With AT&T in 2014
From your cell phone’s dialing keypad long press the number 1 key.
That brings you into the Voice Mail system, where you can listen to messages, manage your password or manage other aspects of your Voice Mail.
1 Listen to messages
4 Change your personal options
Here, you can record a new Voice Mail Greeting, change your password, or remove your password so that you don’t need to enter it to listen to messages. This allows you to access messages the way you always have in the past on an iPhone. Apparently, if you don’t take this step, then each time you want to listen to a voice mail, you must first enter a password. I immediately changed mine, so I’m not 100% certain of this…but I’m 99.9% certain that’s the way it works.
But it’s really a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. The fact that it took me an hour on the phone with a representative, who was absolutely great and helpful, and gave me some wonderful restaurant tips while we waited for things to reset themselves prompted me to write this post. In the hopes I might save someone else a little bit of time!
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