I have a customer with a CICS 6.1 with Startalk Flash 2.0.10 VM recently purchased from another company where it was in use until the new owner took it down. The AA is turned completely off on the CICS and when the Flash is not powered on incoming calls on either of the 2 CO lines will ring indefinitely as expected. The only odd thing is that the ringers on the phones quit after 4 rings but the External Ringer that we installed continues to ring as expected.

The customer wants the VM to only answer while in night mode (or preferably by use of a programmed button) and only wants a single generic mailbox for all incoming calls. I reinitialized the Flash to clear the old owner's settings and took the defaults except I disabled group lists. Everything seems ok except that the Flash answers every incoming call after 4 rings. I tried changing the number of rings for the CICS AA (although I didn't think that should matter because it is disabled anyway), the number of rings for each line in F983 before Flash is supposed to answer and I even went so far as to disable Startalk Flash Line answering in F982 completely. However, no matter what I do, the Flash still answers after just 4 rings.

So the question is 3-fold. Is there a way to program a button that enables easy access to turn the VM system on and off (even if it is working right, using F982 to turn the answering on and off will be a pain)? Any ideas why the VM still picks up even when F982 is suppodly forced to "Answer lines? N"? As an aside, any ideas why the phones would quit ringing after only 4 rings when the AA is not turned on or even trying to be active?

Thanks in advance.