Recovering old Voice Mail Messages.

Usually, Voicemail messages are held in the phone company servers and these messages expire after a certain period of time (usually 14 days with AT&T). These "expired" messages are deleted automatically from the servers at the phone company and they cannot be recovered. The iPhone itself cannot save this messages on its internal memory.

Hope this helps.

The first thing I would recommend is to make sure that the reset phone is logged-in to visual voicemail.

1. Open your Settings app, and make sure your voicemail password is entered in the phone section of settings.
2. Call yourself from your phone and enter your pin at the voice prompt. Make note of whether your messages are still in the voice version of your mailbox.
3. Next, have someone else call you and leave a voicemail. See if your phone pops up the alert that you have a voicemail, and see if you can listen to it in visual voicemail.

If you're connected up to visual voicemail, but none of the old messages are available, you can see what messages you have in older backups using third-party software. I work on Decipher VoiceMail, a program that will let you recover deleted voicemails from your iPhone backups by allowing you to see your full voicemail history that was accessible in all of your iPhone backups. The software looks for your iTunes backups automatically and presents you with the log of your voicemails organized by contacts.

(Note: As I mentioned, I work for the company that develops Decipher VoiceMail that I recommended, so I stand to benefit from my recommendations here.)

This worked really well for me. I am not affiliated with the company in any way, FWIW. I accidentally deleted all of my voicemails by tapping Clear All when I was in the Deleted Items view - it somehow deleted not only my deleted items, but everything in my inbox. This included precious voicemails from my late father-in-law. I tried a bunch of different ways to restore them (Backup Restore, file system utilities, etc.) with no luck. I decided to try Decipher Voicemail and it totally worked. There is a bug that prevented .amr files from being associated with a new app after I changed the association, but converting to MP3 worked. I also now have local copies of all of my voicemails from my backups on two phones, one of which died a couple of years ago, but I still had the backups.

Thanks for sharing this solution - I have all of the voicemails permanently archived now and accessible.

I just spend the past 3 days in tears because I switched carriers from Verizon to T Mobile, and all of my voicemails were gone. I had several that had a lot of sentimental value to me from family members who have passed. I was completely heart broken after speaking with multiple reps from Verizon, T Mobile, and Apple and they all told me that nothing could be done and the voicemails were gone forever. After reading through this thread, I decided to try iExplorer, as per someone's suggestion. POOF! All of my precious voicemails were on my computer within seconds!!! Thank you so much for the suggestions and I hope this helps someone else. I am so grateful to the makers of this program! 😍

www.macroplant.com/iexplorer

I am experiencing the exact same dilemma right now with my girlfriend's iPhone 5s. Switched from VZW to T-Mobile and lost all voicemails as well as very sentimental ones. Did you have to anything special before running the iExplorer app? I'm very interested in trying this... but it seems a little too good to be true.

Thanks!

1. If you've deleted a voicemail message that you really wish you hadn't, simply swipe down your row of messages, all the way to the bottom of the list, and tap on "Deleted Messages."

2. If you have turned on iCloud backup setting on your iPhone before, all your voicemail will be backed up to cloud automactically, you can recover iPhone voicemail messages from the backup easily.

3. You can choose to restore everything from an iTunes backup, it requires that you have connected your iPhone to computer before and iTunes backup your phone.

Both ways the backup will replace your current data on your device. You can go check the official guide for more operational details:

Restore your device from an iCloud or iTunes backup - Apple Support

Reading further in the article I posted you can recover deleted messages in your iPhone. Just go into visual voicemail and in the message list just scroll down to the bottom of the list. You should see a button labeled as "deleted messages", tap the button and a list messages will show. Try to look for your wife's late mother messages.

Hope this helps.

My iPhone 3G was lost or stolen yesterday. I've been saving voicemail messages from my daughter for the past few years (From age 6 to 9). Those messages are gone from the voicemail Cloud now, but have been retained on my phone. Are they saved anywhere on my computer or in iTunes? I've cherished those messages and it breaks my heart if they are gone.

I know this is a very old thread, but do you think my itunes account has to be backed up on the computer to be able to extract voicemails after switching carriers? I think mine is only backed up to the cloud. I lost voicemails from my dad who passed last year

Me too and I have sentimental messages on there. I started crying when I saw they all disappeared when I inserted another sim card :(

I had the same problem! Thought the voicemails from my Father, who has also passed away, were gone. Tonight I found iExployer and it worked wonderfully! I opted to purchase the license product, though they have a free trial, because those voicemails were that important to me. The software easily located my iPhone backup, in iTunes and in moments, there were all those previously saved voicemails. I extracted them to my Desktop and even though they are .amr files, RealPlayer plays them perfectedly. I just wanted to hear his voice.. and now those files are safe on our external server, never to be lost again. Check them out! http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

As far as my personal experience goes, the only things that get saved in iTunes are apps, contacts, music, videos, and settings. I have done iPhone restores in the past but I don't recall any of my old voice messages getting restored. The only messages that were "restored" per se, were the ones in the telephone company servers.

However, during a quick google search I found an article talking about the iPhone voicemail app and how to recover deleted messages. I don't know if it will help but it might be worth a shot. The article link is below:

http://i.tuaw.com/2011/09/16/iphone-101-recovering-deleted-voicemails/

Good Luck!

I don't believe I had visual voicemail. I think as long as you have back your phone up to your computer, the information will be there. That's what happened to me. I literally downloaded the app, opened it, and all of my stuff was there. I hope this helps and I hope that works out for your girlfriend. Good luck!

Voice mail is saved on the iPhone on the hard drive. Drive out to where there are no towers and listen to your voice mail. Apple has decided for ease of use to not allow you to manage the recordings, but they are there.

I experienced loss of important archived voicemails on my Iphone after restoring my Iphone 4s to Iphone 5 using ITunes backup files and again about 6 mos later after restoring another new Iphone 5 with a recent ITunes backup after water damage occurred to my first Iphone 5. Nobody in my local Apple store or on Apple phone support, including a "senior technician" had any useful knowledge to assist me with this issue. Ultimately, I spent many hours researching this myself and found that Iphone voicemails are available for a limited period 30-90 days depending on the carrier but more importantly, voicemails ARE also indeed archived on an ITune backup. These voicemails are archived regardless of age assuming you didn't delete them off your IPhone before last backing up your device.

So, if you lost or damaged your iphone but have an ITunes backup, all you need is an ITunes extractor, unfortunately not available through Apple. There are several ITunes extractors available for music, photos, SMS files but most do not read voicemails. I successfully extracted from my ITune backup file all my voicemails, old and current using http://www.backuptrans.com/itunes-backup-extractor.html (Windows and MAC versions available). A life-saver!