Voice Mail Etiquette

I wish everybody would pay more attention to their voice mailboxes. To wit:
1) Please configure your cell-phone mailbox. If you don't use paging or other features, configure your mailbox to suppress those options so we don't have to hear that they are available every we call you before we can leave a message.
2) Please start your outgoing message by saying how to skip it, so frequent callers don't have to listen to your whole message before being able to leave a message. (Since I use my cell phone a lot, there's nothing more frustrating than having to wait through all this and then lose the signal before I can leave a message.)
3) Please don't answer your phone if you can't talk. I've had this happen numerous times, when people answer the phone to say (in a whisper) that they can't talk because they are in a meeting. My immediate thought is: "Why the heck did you answer the phone then?" I would prefer to leave a message if you can't talk.
4) Please be honest about your voice mailbox. If you don't use a particular mailbox (at home, at work or even on cell), say so and redirect the caller to a different number. One of my frequent contacts has just let his voice mailbox fill up so that it is not possible to leave messages anymore. This seems an inefficient use of the callers' time, versus just admitting that you don't use the mailbox.
Eventually, we'll get what we all really want: a single mailbox for all kinds of phones, rather than this mishmash where PBX vendors and service providers each try to control our business by providing a single, proprietary mailbox that doesn't integrate with any others. (And then we'll have voice mail that delivers an email notice that you have a message, maybe even including the message.)
If you have additional rules you'd like to add, please comment or send me an email and I'll modify this posting over time to reflect input.

Comments

[Mark]

Amen to that. Preach on. BTW, I just added a Vonage IP phone number for my home business, and my single favorite feature is that it will email MP3s of my voicemail to me (or notifications that I've received voicemail, which I can listen to from my page on the Vonage site).