I recently upgraded my ancient Blackberry Curve 8310 with a shiny new iPhone 4. I never believed the hype about the grip of death or whatever they called it, and I’ve never had that problem so my disbelief was justified, I think.

However, when I first got the phone, I activated the visual voicemail option, configured it, and enjoyed it’s functions for some time.

Until I reset the phone.

The phone then lost my visual voicemail settings. No customized greeting, no password. This continued happening every time I rebooted the phone, which you can imagine would be quite annoying to keep having to re-record my message.

I made a call to my provider who claimed it was a known problem that Apple was working on an update for. And stupidly I believed him, not that I had any other choice at that point. Google had revealed no real gems initially, since the phone was relatively new.

Eventually I stumbled across a solution. I wish I knew where it was I read it so I could refer to it, but basically it was this: recover your iPhone to factory defaults, then synch it to iTunes as a new device.

It was a drastic move, but fortunately everything I needed was already synched. Music, contacts, images. So all I really had to do is set it up as a new device and wait until it was done synching.

Since performing this fix, Visual Voicemail functions perfectly and has lost no settings.

It was a weird issue but I hope this helps someone somewhere.