APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR ROUTING MESSAGES IN A TELEPHONE MESSAGE CENTER

A telephone message system overcomes the problems and limitations of presently available systems that seek to enhance inter-and intra-premises communications. The system comprises a controller unit with Caller ID capabilities and one or more adjunct units that are bridged onto a single wire-pair at a user's residential location in a parallel electrical connection. These customer installable units are merely plugged into any telephone jack and share a telephone wire-pair with existing telephone extensions without interference. For facilitating a message routing capability, a mailbox of groups of telephone numbers is associated with a particular party at the residence. These telephone numbers are preprogrammed into the controller unit so that upon receipt of an incoming call, one of these telephone numbers, identified through Caller ID, is associated with the particular called party. If a called party is unavailable, the controller unit is configured with information as to the status of the called party and the controller unit routes the incoming call directly to the called party's mail box where the calling party is able to leave a message. The controller unit also may be configured to generate a specific outgoing message to the calling party previously recorded by the unavailable called party associated with the reached mailbox. A user may easily access received messages stored in his or her mailbox in the message system which may be configured as either open or restricted. If the message system is configured as open, then a user may access not only messages in his or her mailbox but also access messages in any of other mailboxes also in the system. If the message system is configured as restricted, however, then a user is allowed access only to messages in his or her mailbox.