We have a Merlin Mail Voice Messaging System Release 3 that has sporadic problems answering calls. It will work fine and then I'll get a call on my cell phone from my wife saying she's tried to call me for the last 10 minutes and the system did not answer, it just keeps ringing.

I think this problem occurs when we have all lines on the system in use at the same time. We should have enough lines for the amount of calls we recieve.

I've noticed that if I call in and hang up during the auto attendant's message, the call will not drop, and then it gets transfered to the call answer service operator, who picks it up and gets an annoying busy tone. When the operator hangs up, it gets disconnected, but it should be disconnected long before it gets transferred.

Can anyone help me out? I am willing to pay to get this fixed. I am a computer techie but not a phone guy.

thanks,

Curt

PM me for a phone # if you can fix this.

You may not have enough VM ports.
And you might want to check and see if your phone lines have COD on them.

Loop start trunks on a T1 circuit can cause this problem. Check to see that the Reliable Disconnect feature is turned on in the telephone system.

Reliable Disconnect fixed the problem of calls not dropping when callers hang up.

thanks for your help guys!!!

Do you have all lines going to the auto attendant. This sounds like you may not have all of the lines assigned to the auto attendant. They may not be assigned to anything if it just rings open. Also as Mike stated you may not have enough ports to handle the capacity of calls.

Mike

Glad that Reliable Disconnect solved your problem.

That may have been it, lines locking up the VM ports until they can't answer any more calls.

Or, you could have a dead line in the hunt sequence, and anytime an incoming call hits that trunk, it's ring-no-answer.

The phone company could also have screwed up the hunting, and have it hunting into the twilight zone.

So, you should call each of your lines individually, and make sure that they answer.

Then you should test your hunt group, by picking up a specific line, and dialing that line's own number, to confirm that it hunts to the next line in sequence. When you hit the last line in the group, dialing its own number should return a busy signal.