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Not being allowed to record outgoing message on my iPhone

When I click on the blue marked "Greeting, I get a message that says, "Retrieving greeting..." This usually takes about a minute or two. Then I get a window with a message that reads,


"Greeting fetch failed -- Failed to fetch your voicemail greeting from the server." It doesn't matter if I pick "Default," because it keeps taking me to "Custom," link. What server are they talking about?


When I click "Ok," or when I click on any of the blue links nothing happens, because they are grayed out or the blue links have frozen in place. If I'm lucky to record the message again, it takes FOREVER to save it and I get another window say, "Greeting save failed -Failed to save your greeting." Anyone know why this is happening and what I can do about it? I'd be much obliged for any insight. Thank you.


P.S. When I first tried setting up the outgoing voice message, I wasn't having any issues. It happened about an hour later, when I went into the Settings to listen to the outgoing greeting again. That's when it started acting up.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), iMac 27"/ iMac 20"/ Macbook Air 13"

Posted on Feb 15, 2014 10:28 PM

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Posted on Feb 16, 2014 2:13 PM

It seems I found the solution. Had to shutdown my iPhone and let it recharge. Thanx everyone for your overwhelming help! -Kathryne

7 replies

May 2, 2014 10:53 AM in response to Kathryne_B [nom de plume]

I've discovered that if you have less than 1gb of available storage on your iPhone, trying to change the outgoing greeting will often fail without giving you any indication of the trouble. I could not even retrieve my existing message until I had 800mb free, even with a restart of the device. And then I couldn't record a new one until I had a gb free.


It would be nice if Apple gave us an error related to the storage space instead of just saying "failed".

Oct 20, 2014 4:55 PM in response to juneafish

So I had plenty of space left on my phone (8+ GBs) but after trying a couple other things, remembered that I have gotten the "voicemail 90% full warning" a few times in the past. I had maybe 20 voicemails, and 160 deleted voicemails (which I didn't even realize was a thing--I'm new to iPhone and on my Droid, once I deleted the VMs, they were gone). I cleared out the deleted folder and 10 of the voicemails and that did the trick--I was finally able to listen to and change my greeting!

Not being allowed to record outgoing message on my iPhone

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