Hi to you phone installers!

I just moved my office to my house and need voice mail, but don't want to pay $40/month to the phone company to do it. Rather spend a few hundred if needed and just have it. But, my needs are specific. I went to Fry's electronics to browse their phone/answering machines and stand alone answering machines and they don't seem to do what I want:

I need three or four mailboxes. That's easy - any answering machine will do that. But I need it to work in a specific way. I want a main greeting when the phone rings, plus individual greetings for each mailbox.

The answering machines that have 3 mailboxes allow the main greeting - "Hi, if you want John, press 1, Leroy, press 2, or Ed, press 3." Then you get the beep and the message gets stored in that mailbox.

I need one that will give the main greeting, but when the client presses 1, he gets another greeting, "Hi this is John, and here is my schedule for the next week....(blah, blah, blah)...you can leave a message now" and so on for pressing 2 and 3. Off the shelf devices don't seem to do this.

1. Do you know of a simple answering machine that will do what I need it to?

2. If the answer to #1 is no, is there a voice mail device that is affordable and reasonably easy to use without having a phone system to accompany it (a la Panasonic, etc...I won't have a KSU and don't want to install one.)

3. Thanks as always for the great advice!

=Tom

not my strong point, but did you think of looking at PC SW

Tom,

To do it well, you're looking at a little more than a couple hundred bucks...but check out recommendations from Fred and the boys at Capitol Sales...there IS a 4 line panasonic system, the 4000 series, that has four lines, 8 mailboxes, etc....that would fit your bill I think!

[Link: catalog2.panasonic.com]

good luck!

I spent alot of time trying PC based (Windows) software, and settled on this one:
[Link: toscintl.com]
Call Soft Pro
Shareware with a registration of $49, which I gladly paid after using it for a week. I am amazed at the level of features that is in this software, so it is actually quite a bargin.
I am using it with a main menu, 3 mailboxes, and it makes mpg's of my messages and emails them to me. It also does faxes, however I have not used that feature.
If you try it, do pay attention to the recommended modem list. The first modem I tried had low voice levels which caused some cut off messages. So I went out to Fry's and got one of the modems on the list (Zoom 3025C), and it works very reliably now.

Check out TalkWorks software by Symantics. It'll do exactly what you want. You can find it on Yahoo for $60. It will even page you when a message is left. It used to be bundled with Winfaxpro (another great product) maybe still is.

Good luck.

You may also want to look at some of the multifuntion fax machines on the market. I'm using an older Panasonic (KX-F1150) which has a general box plus 3 discrete mailboxes. It also recognizes inbound faxes and switches into fax receive mode when needed. All on one phone line and with a myriad of local/remote access features and has a really simple and useable PC software link via the serial port.

Both the M9516 and Venture DTAD phones will do what you want and much more. You can even have a personalized greeting based on the calling line ID. They were made by Nortel, but that group was sold of to Aastra about 5 years ago. They can be found refurbished at many places on the Web.

This message was edited by Westie on 10/06/04 17:26 ET.