Patent ID: 7043232

Claim:
In a multimedia telecommunications network having facilities for providing a voicemail and multimedia mail service to a subscriber, a method of sending a personalized outgoing voicemail or multimedia mail message to a caller, the method comprising: storing the subscriber's personalized outgoing voicemail and multimedia mail messages at a first network element; receiving a call having a unique caller ID for the subscriber at a second network element; determining at the second network element whether the subscriber has activated the service and whether the subscriber is unavailable to take the call; where the service has been activated by the subscriber and the subscriber is unavailable to take the call, forwarding the call to the first network element; analyzing at the first network element the caller ID of the call to determine which of the stored outgoing messages is an appropriate outgoing message for the caller; and playing the appropriate outgoing message to the caller, wherein each of the subscriber's personalized outgoing voicemail and multimedia mail messages includes at least three fields, the fields comprising a message field, an associated caller ID field, and a feature activation status field.