Since I turned on an option a month ago called “Silence incoming calls” all of my calls were going to VM. This was a problem for me.
I was missing calls that I wanted to receive. The function of Silence incoming calls was to block numbers that originated from blocked or private numbers. I had my share of spam calls and once I turned that off, it blocked those people. So I wasn’t going to turn that feature off.
I called my cell provider US Mobile and talked to an unhelpful person. They suggested that I turn the feature off. Well that was Apples suggestion to toggle it off and on, and then to reset the phone and set it up from scratch. Normally those kinds of advice don’t work. They are just a way to waste peoples time and divert them from the real issue.
I explained to the support person that I had already tried toggling the feature on and off and while that worked for some people, it didn’t work for me. I didn’t want to reinstall mainly because MFA can be a little time consuming to set up when you are a consultant and work with multiple clients. So there had to be something else we could do to troubleshoot this.
The support person suggested that we reset the Voice mail. We did that and it didn’t work. It still showed my old VM messages. Then they said that they would going to delete the entire VM and then set it up. I did that and then called a friend and asked them to call me back. Instead of going to VM it actually rang. Success!
This is the second time that I have had problems with VM with different carriers. The solution for fixing the problems with that carrier was to delete VM and reset it up as well. The root of this problem might have been when I switched to US Mobile. In the process it can be a little confusing and they seemed to offer both a personal and business line. I may have chosen the wrong option, and so when I enabled the Silence incoming calls it might have thought that since the line wasn’t available the only option would be to go to VM. This is just my theory. So if you don’t want to delete your VM, ask support if they can verify that your lines are set up correctly.
Good luck in fixing your VM/phone issues.