when telephone 12 is no longer busy steps 58 and 60 are desirable for several reasons for example if a user 10 receives a message while on telephone 12 1 user 10 may not notice a message waiting light or 2 user 10 might forget to listen for a stutter dial tone after hanging up telephone 12 with steps 58 and 60 switch 20 camps on user 39 s 10 line and calls user 10 as soon as user 10 hangs up telephone 12 furthermore some users receive caller identification on their telephones under these circumstances a user can avoid answering the telephone when an undesirable identified party calls while the user may want to avoid a certain caller the user may still want notification of awaiting messages thus steps 58 and 60 provide notification as soon as the undesirable caller has left a message in a voice mail system when telephone 12 is not busy the process moves to step 70 at step 70 the system rings telephone 12 using a specific ring pattern this ring pattern notifies user 10 that the call is related to awaiting telephone messages in mailbox 24 in another embodiment of the invention various ring patterns can be used to identify different types of messages for example a w ring pattern may identify regular messages and.