Deleted voicemails on your iPhone are not actually deleted. Here’s why and how to delete them for good

My voicemail is filled with automated message reminders, useless dial-ups, and spam messages that have nothing to do with my day-to-day life. Listening to and deleting these messages is not something I usually do, but it can be helpful to prevent the dreaded “Inbox full” message that incoming callers sometimes receive.

However, if you’ve ever looked through your iPhone’s picture voicemails and deleted older or useless voicemails, the truth is, you probably haven’t deleted them.

Voicemail messages are usually stored on the mobile service provider’s servers; they are not automatically stored on the phone, but they can be backed up to iCloud or a computer.

As voicemail hosting providers, voicemail settings are relatively limited on your phone, so if you’re having issues with voicemail that you can’t seem to solve by troubleshooting , then maybe your service provider knows how to fix it.

The fact is that voicemail is usually stored on your carrier’s servers and not on your phone itself, that’s why you have to set up voicemail again when you switch service providers. or get new phones and why you are likely to lose them in the process unless they are backed up.

How to Delete Your Deleted iPhone Voicemail

Step 1: Go to Voicemail

The Phone The app is home to recent calls, contacts, favorites list, dial pad and voicemail. That’s where you can access voicemail with pictures.

Go Voicemail upper tab Phone application.

Step 2: Delete unwanted messages

One of the cool things about visual voicemail is that it makes it easier to delete your voicemail.

I’m a person who likes to get rid of old and unwanted stuff in general, but remember when we had to call our own voicemail to check our messages? We had to sit there waiting for the recording to go through the inbox so we could press a button on the keyboard to delete the message.

There are two ways to delete voicemail on your phone: select an individual message and delete it (left side) or click Edit in the top right corner of Voicemail and select a number to delete at once (the right). Unfortunately, there is no Select All option.

Step 3: Check deleted messages

If you’ve deleted all the messages, you’re now staring at a seemingly “empty” inbox, but with a Deleted Messages button. Deleted messages is like the cemetery for your deleted voicemails. And that’s where you can retrieve them if you accidentally delete the one you want to save. iPhone also stores your deleted photos in the Photos app for 30 days for this reason.

But if you forget this place exists, your voicemails will pile up in there, just like mine.

I have voicemail messages in the Deleted folder from January 2019, around the time I got my iPhone XS Max. Mind you, I also switched phone service providers at the end of 2021, so where are all the voicemails stored? Is it only on the service provider’s server or on the phone? It seems that, in my case, most of it is stored on the phone itself.

Step 4: Click on Clear all

When I touch Deleted message, all the voicemails I deleted in the last 3.5 years are there. When you’re in Deleted messageyou can just touch Clean everything to remove all of them.

Also: How to set up voicemail on iPhone

But can you be 100% sure that your voicemail will be permanently deleted?

Deleting voicemails from your picture voicemails will delete them from your carrier’s servers, but is that so? Verizon says deleting these messages, plus voicemails in the deleted messages folder on iPhone will delete them permanently and cannot be undone, leading to the inference that deleted visual VM messages are also deleted from service provider server. If you are concerned about this, I recommend that you call your carrier to confirm this is the case.

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