In alt.home.repair, on Tue, 5 Jan 2021 08:07:32 -0500, Ed Pawlowski
wrote:

On 1/5/2021 9:20 AM, micky wrote:
I have a home phone, wired, but supplied by Verizon Fios.

How can I know if I have voicemail waiting without picking up the phone?

Like a light or a beeper.

I'm willing to buy something.

When I google, everything is about cell phones.

I have a phone machine, and when a message is left there a light flashes
on every phone in the house, plus the base phone beeps once in a while.
That's just fine.

But sometimes for reasons I don't understand**, the voicemail answers
the phone before the machine does. Today there were 5 such messages
including my brother who called Sunday, but it was too late on Monday to
call him back, so it will take me two days. I don't want a repeat of
that. (The other 4 were silence.)

**I've set the ring count before anssering on the voice mail to 6, the
maximum, and on the phone machine to 4, so the machine should always
answer first. Unless the storage is full but it never is, and I
wouldn't be complaining if it were. Actually it's nice that voicemail
backs up the machine -- at least I think it would, maybe, I think --
after it takes about 30 messages. At the least it's nice that voicemail
will take messages when I'm on the phone and I don't respond to
call-waiting, which of course is usually spammers, so I don't even look.

I talked to Verizon and there is no way I myself can turn off my voice
mail. They will do it but then I have to call again, to turn it back on
when I go out of town. Before the virus I planned to go out of town
last March,

I'm confused. You have both a machine and Verizon voice mail? Sounds
like they are possibly working against each other.

Yes, I have both, but they're not working against each other. Normally
the phone machine answers. Sometimes the voicemail does a) when the
phone is accidentally off the hook, which has happened, b) when I'm on
the phone, which has happened a lot, and c) sometimes when I can't
account for it, but eventually I'll figure that out.

I'd try to live with
just one.

Let's assume I chose voicemail. How can I know if I have a voicemail
message waiting without picking up the phone? Is there a gizmo I can
buy, or some other way?

I use the machine and if I'm out of town, tough, you wait
until I get back.

The problem is when I *am* home and I get a voicemail but don't know
I"ve gotten it, because I haven't used the home phone to make a call.