Anyone whom uses asterisk knows that Asterisk can send voicemail notifications to your cell phone. Normally the Asterisk voicemail.conf file would look like this:

201 => 1234,Eric,my@email.com,CELLNUMBER@vtext.com,|tz=eastern|volgain=3.0

This would send a short text message to your cell phone indicating you have a new voicemail. It would also send the voicemail itself as an attachment to your email address. This example goes to a Verizon wireless cell phone. Once you get the notification you still need to check the voicemail. This could be as simple as dialing in from your cell phone to check on the voicemail remotely. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just get the message directly to your cell phone? You can! The audio message that is attached is just a wave file that seems to be playable on most phones as a multimedia attachment. For Verizon you just need to send it to a different email address:

201 => 1234,Eric,CELLNUMBER@vzwpix.com,,|tz=eastern|volgain=4.0

This changes the email address to be the email address for Verizon’s MMS gateway. What shows up on the phone is PIX message with an audio component. You can then play the voicemail directly from your phone. I also had to adjust the volgain in order to raise the volume. Here’s the list for other cell carriers. I know it works for Verizon. In theory it should work many other carries and phones. Anyone who has luck with this, please post and let me know.