topic Re: Visual Voicemail activated but not working in Mobile Services

Visual Voicemail activated but not working

Emdecy — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:46:13 GMT

I've just switched to EE and was excited to enable visual voicemail but it's not going well. I'm on an iPhone 13 mini running iOS 16.5, so I'm up to date.

First I activated it and when I tapped the tab on the phone app, it told me I needed to set it up. When entering a pin and pressing save it would load forever then error with “Voicemail Error: Try again later”.

I tried de-activating and re-activating visual voicemail a few times but it made no difference.

Spoke to live chat and they did various tests and eventually told me to reset my network settings. This got me past the setup screen and I thought all was well and that it would now work, but I was wrong. If someone calls me and leaves a message, nothing shows. If I go in to greetings. it sticks on "Retrieving greeting..." for about 30 seconds then stops. If I try to record and save a custom greeting I get "The operation couldn't be completed. (com.apple.mobilephone error 1035.). Internet searches suggest this means visual voicemail is not set up correctly.

I'm running out of things to try. I must have rebooted my phone 50 times in the past 48 hours trying to get it to work.

We've enabled the exact same service on my partner's phone today and it instantly works with no issues.

Anyone have any suggestions for how I can fix this?

Re: Visual Voicemail activated but not working

Emdecy — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 15:16:51 GMT

Figured this one out and posting it here so that someone in the future might discover it and fix their issue.

A while back I had enabled DNS over HTTPS on my phone. In particular I had enabled Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS using a profile on iOS. Disabling this profile immediately made visual voicemail work.

It seems that visual voicemail somehow relies on intercepting unencrypted DNS requests (I suspect it redirects a request to a particular server).

So if you're seeing "The operation couldn't be completed. (com.apple.mobilephone error 1035.)" or something along the lines of "Voicemail Error. Please try again later". This might be your issue.

Edit: For the technical minded, I've discovered you need to exclude vvm.ee.co.uk from the DNS profile so it can make insecure DNS requests. This solves the issue.

Re: Visual Voicemail activated but not working

James_B — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 15:03:44 GMT

Thanks for sharing @Emdecy 🙂

James

Re: Visual Voicemail activated but not working

andrejz2438 — Fri, 24 May 2024 13:45:40 GMT

New guy here who joined EE pay monthly sim in May2024... I have an iphone 13 and texted "VISUAL ON" to 150 and received a reply that visual voicemail is activated and I need to restart my phone. So I did but it didn't work saying "Voicemail Error. Try again later".

Thanks to the other user, what you have to do is go into the Settings app, search for "profile" and tap on "VPN & Device Management" at the top.

Then remove VPN profiles and stuff that may have been put in by a VPN app, in my case AdguardVPN app which I also uninstalled.

After that I was able to use visual voicemail.

Thanks to contributer Emdecy from 16th June 2023.

Signed,

andrejz2438 24th May 2024