I personally prefer it not auto delete. If I haven't deleted it yet, it's obviously for a reason.

Maybe you could mark the ones you want to keep and the others could be deleted automatically -- kind of like Tivo.

Yeah, I have to agree with Andrew. Given the choice, I'd rather not have AT&T automatically start deleting my saved voice mails. That being said, I wonder if it's necessary at all for the voice mails to be saved on AT&T's servers rather than locally on the iPhone. 18 minutes of voice-quality audio shouldn't take up a whole lot of space. Locally-stored voicemail would also open up the potential to forward them to email accounts as WAV files or AAC, or perhaps even sync with the Mail app through iTunes.

Of course, I'm not that popular, so it would take a while for me to fill up my mailbox as things stand :-)

I thought the voicemail downloads to your phone - hence the instant playback?

It would make sense to let the user store as many as they want on the built in memory, no?

Well since the messages aren't stored on the phone I can kinda see why they only allow so much. Otherwise it could get quite out of hand on how ATT is supposed to store all those voicemails.

Automatic deletion would result in denial-of-service attacks on your voice mail being destructive, rather than just annoying.

That's pretty dumb... to automatically erase the old mails..

1. The reason I have a message not deleted after hearing means.. that I need it, otherwise, I would have immediately deleted.

2. You clearly cannot delete messages that I have not heard..

3. So, how does today's email work? When my inbox is full, it doesn't delete emails.. it tells the person that don't the recipient's inbox is full. That way, the sender knows that the message did not reach the person.

The way currently system works is just fine.

This whole business of enabling what messages to be deleted and what not to be deleted...

if you don't want a message just delete it, rather than marking those that are important. The default option is that all messages are important.

I don't want to see things change with regard to this.

I TOTALLY do not see the point of voice mails. So I switched it off.

When I miss a call, I see a missed call and call them back, which is cheaper and less hassle than first listening to someone's voicemail (which usually sounds like "oh shit... hang-up sound") and the calling them back.

Since seeing the visual voicemail feature in the January Keynote, I thought it would be absolutely amazing if Apple could figure out how to allow me to save these voice messages as transferable audio files. Clearly I want to listen again or I'd have deleted them already.

Could Apple bypass the issue of "full mailbox" by allowing the phone user to save voice messages as audio files? What drawbacks are there? Do you imagine AT&T having any hesitations to this process? I wouldn't think so. After all, it's not like they could profit off people calling and hearing a full mailbox message?

Imagine having the opportunity to listen to a nice message from a friend or cute comment from a sibling/significant other. Or that drunk call I wanted to relisten to years down the road or keep for blackmail purposes.

"If you call my phone right now, you’ll get a message saying “The mailbox belonging to Jim Dalrymple is full and cannot receive anymore messages. Please try again later.”

Good thing people don't try and get in touch with you about news stories and such.

Get many voicemail reruns Jim?

Hmm. Considering that if the Visual Voicemail system isn't working it defaults back to the ordinary server-side voicemail, this is very surprising -- it means that AT&T has neatly and efficiently removed themselves from the responsibility of storing our voicemails! You'd think that if the iPhone was full (and how does it decide if it is full? Will it use all 8gb for voicemail if it is available, or does it have a built-in storage limit for voicemails?) the messages would simply queue up on AT&T regular voicemail system...

Do deleted voicemails take up space on the AT&T servers? If so, perhaps it could empty your deleted voicemails automatically to get back space.

But wait -- visual voicemail messages ARE stored locally on the phone, aren't they? They must be -- I'm able to listen to them even when in areas that lack cell service (like my house!).

My iPhone uses the Edge Network just fine, for a minute. Generally after it has loaded a page, the Internet drops and I go back to the home iPhone screen. Any clues as to why?

From my own experimentation, the voicemails are copied down locally... but are ALSO kept on the AT&T voicemail server.

If I dial in to my voicemail from an outside line (i.e., not my iPhone), I find all my downloaded messages as 'saved messages.' In testing, when I delete a message on the iPhone, it goes away on the AT&T voicemail once it is emptied from the voicemail trash. In addition, if I reset/restore my iPhone, all my saved voicemails reappear after I go back into Visual Voicemail.

So it looks to me like what happens is the iPhone just downloads copies of all the messages on your AT&T voicemail, but leaves them intact on the voicemail system until you delete them in Visual Voicemail. This would explain why the AT&T voicemail can still fill up.

It seems to me also to be the best of both worlds; I can access my voicemail locally even when out of signal range, but I can get to my messages in the traditional interface from a land-line phone if I must.

I managed to not only fill up my voice mails but my text messages, too! Bummer.
~C