On Tuesday, January 5, 2021 at 8:48:48 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On 1/5/21 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 also made another mistake. Even though I had long deprecated voice
mail for having to pick up the handset to know about it, I recorded a
messaage, "I'm busy. Please leave a message or call back later."
Nowhere near strong enough wrt calling back later. I'll fix that
tonight.)

BTW, voicemail gives two messages, the one I recorded which plays if the
phone is off the hook and probably if I'm on the phone. AND the one
which plays if no one answes. That just slowly recites my phone number
in a computer voice, then after a while asks if the caller wants to save
it, redo it, erase it. Maybe there was a way to record a real message
but I didn't see it.

Yes there are devices to do what you want.
One thing first, you need to know if the signal you get from your telco
is Stutter Dial Tone, or "FSK"

You can read the gory details here, and see which product works for you

http://www.sandman.com/messwait.html

Interesting, so there are standard protocols. But that description seems old
and covers analog phones wired to the central office. Sounds like Micky has
VOIP and I wonder if they continued those?