These features of the Voicemail system are very useful, especially over the holiday season, but there is remarkably little information about them on the website. Indeed, I haven’t been able to find any information, although I use them regularly, and I must have discovered them by some means or other in the past.
The Temporary Greeting does what it says on the box. It enables you to use a temporary greeting while you’re on holiday, but it doesn’t involve recording over your usual personal greeting. When you get back from your holiday, you can disable the temporary greeting, and your personal greeting will come back into action. Your Voicemail will take messages in the usual way, whether you have the Personal Greeting or the Temporary Greeting activated.
The Extended Absence Greeting behaves much as the Temporary Greeting, but with one major difference - it doesn’t let callers leave you a message. This can be useful if you will be staying for a while in an area that has no signal, or when you don’t want to take calls at all for a while, but you don’t want callers leaving messages and wondering why you aren’t getting back to them.
The following instructions assume that you already have Voicemail set up; if you haven’t, you will first need to set it up by calling 121, and following the instructions. If you will be going abroad, and want to be able to use Voicemail while you are away, don’t forget to set a Voicemail PIN while you are still in the UK, as you require a VM PIN to access voicemail from abroad, and you can only set it from your own phone while in the UK. See https://support.vodafone.co.uk/Calls-texts-and-voicemail/Voicemail/ for further details.
How to set up a Temporary Greeting or Extended Absence Greeting:
Call 121
If necessary, press 1 for the Main Menu
Press 3 for Personal Greetings
You are then offered the following options:
Option 2 to Manage Personal Greeting
Option 3 to Manage Main Greeting (I have a Main Greeting, but I’m not convinced it does anything!) [Edit: just to be clear, it is Personal Greeting that says "this is Ann's phone, please leave a message". My Main Greeting just says "Ann", and I can't find under what circumstances it gets used!]
Option 4 to Manage Temporary Greeting
Option 5 to Manage Extended Absence Greeting
Press 4 (Temporary Greeting), or 5 (Extended Absence Greeting)
Once you have made this selection, you are offered
2 Listen to greeting; 3 (re-)Record greeting; 4 Delete greeting; 5 Enable greeting; 6 Disable greeting and revert to Personal Greeting.
It’s easier to do in practice than it is to explain it! But you can check, when you think that you have finished, by disconnecting the call, then calling 121 again; if either Temporary Greeting or Extended Absence Greeting is currently active, you will be informed of this before you hear your messages, with a reminder that they can be managed through Main Option 3 for Personal Greetings.
Enjoy your holiday, and don’t forget to switch back to your standard Personal Greeting when you get home.
Annie.
