I recently replaced one of my landlines with an internet-based phone number that rings directly into voicemail.  I signed up for PrivatePhone by NetZero.  PrivatePhone gives me a free local phone number that rings directly to a voice mailbox that can store up to 10,000 voicemail messages.  Whenever anyone leaves a message in the mailbox, I receive a text message on my cellphone.  I can then call my voice mailbox to retrieve my messages or I can login to my personal email account to listen to the message via an attached .WAV file.  When listening to a voicemail, I can call the person back by pressing the number "2" on my phone, and I am allowed up to 10 free return calls per month.

To listen to voicemail messages, I call my PrivatePhone number, wait until my outgoing announcement begins, and then press the asterisk key (*).  I am then prompted to enter my password.

Since I wanted to assign a speed dial on my hw6925 to handle message retrieval, I created a PrivatePhone contact and then entered the follow information:  (###) ###-####,,*1234, where # represents the actual digits of my phone number, the commas represent a 4 second pause, and 1234 represents my 4-digit password.  It works great!

Nowadays, many voicemail systems allow you to retrieve messages without having to enter in a password, and that's how my Cingular voicemail is set up.  Furthermore, many companies provide employees with direct dial phone numbers so there isn't much need to key in extension numbers since using direct dial phone numbers bypass PBX systems.  But on occasion you may need to interject different dialing commands into phone numbers, so here's a list of Dialing Patterns that you can use with GSM or CDMA phones:

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