f1vlad's Journal: Tuning your voice mail

When I moved to America, I discovered voice mail. At first cool, eventually [mostly] huge waste of time.

For instance: "hey this is me, bye", "why are you not answering your phone?", "call me!", "this me, I have nothing to do so I decided to call you", and so on. The only argument one can make here is that, yes, some of these short messages could be helpful if there is no "no missed calls" message on your phone or otherwise when a phone has been out of network, out of battery power, or simply turned off.

On the other hand, there definitely are meaningful voice mails; for example: "Hi, this is your insurance agent, we wanted to remind you to come to our office tonight to renew your policy".

So where exactly is time wasted? I will tell you. Time is wasted not only listening to meaningless voice mails, but also retrieving them, here is general rough scenario of retrieving one message:

1. dial voice mail;
2. enter pin code/password;
3. listen to "you have 2 new messages and 1000 old messages, click 1 to listen to new message, click 2 to listen to old messages";
4. listen to "message number one, received on February 3rd, at 5 o'clock, to listen to the message click 1, to delete this message click 2".

It varies from one provider to another making this process easier or harder. To listen to each new message I have perform some time-consuming work. Apple, however, was the first one with breakthrough called visual voice mail, but it still only works on AT&T iPhone. Another public service that does sort of visual voice mails online is Google's GrandCentral. The latter one is the solution to the problem.

Bottom line -- voice mails are useful occasionally, sometimes important, but often time-wasters.

I tasked myself to ease management of these annoying things while not lose potentially important voice messages. I had t-mobile service. I was unwilling to switch iPhone data plan with AT&T. I did have a sort of ideal solution for visual voice mails with GrandCentral. The only problem was -- connect my t-mobile account with GrandCentral account in a way that only voice mail be outsourced to GrandCentral. Thankfully, a GSM-based network, which t-mobile is, does make this possible!

Solution to the problem, that is, connecting t-mobile account with GrandCentral account comes with the help of GSM MMI codes.

MMI codes are special sets of commands that allow you to configure your GSM phone. In other words, tt allows for alternative non-GUI way to configure some common things such as changing PIN, as well as some hidden/undocumented features of the phone/network such as changing your voice mail forward number, which is exactly the problem we're trying to solve!

And so we have come to solution. Open the dialer and dial the following three commands, one by one, and click dial:

1. *67*16031231212# -- forward call to 1(603)123-12-12 if line is busy;
2. *61*16031231212# -- forward call to 1(603)123-12-12 if phone not answered;
3. *62*16031231212# -- forward call to 1(603)123-12-12 if out of reach.

some remarks: (1) 16031231212 is fictional phone number for this example, (2) these settings are performed to GSM account, not device; therefore, if one phone is unable to execute these settings, try another one (borrow someone else's) with your SIM card, (3) depending on your GSM provider some MMI codes may not work.

Hope this solution helps some people who are struggling like I used to.

MMI codes resources

1. Steve Punter's Southern Ontario Cell Phone Page
2. GSM Command Strings