I read it in one of the tech blogs and can confirm that those superfluous prompts to "press 5" for a page, etc. are now gone. You can still instruct callers to press 5 if you wish to be paged, but the prompt from the voicemail system is now gone! When you reach voicemail now it now immediately goes to the tone so you can make whatever recording you like without the extra prompts. I have shortened mine to "this is Joseph, please leave me a message."
When did this happen? I also noticed that when I ported my number from Verizon back to T-Mobile, I do not have an option 2 to send a voicemail to another T-Mobile customer. But for an older prepaid account, that option is still there.
I have no idea when it happened. I only know about it from reading it in a tech blog and then I tested it out myself.
Perhaps you need to tweak one of the options. Go to your voicemail press option 4 (mailbox options) then option 6 (prompt level.) Perhaps that's what you need to do. To test this I had to call my number from another phone to see what callers get when they call and encounter my voicemail.
That could be what occurred, something might have reset causing the prompt level to change. I still don't have the option 2 to send a new voicemail on the $30/unlimited data/100-minute plan I have now, but an older number on the $2.00/day plan, still does.
