Delivery of urgent messages by integrated forced delivery and voice mailbox

A method for delivering voice mail to an intended recipient in which a voice-mail message is recorded for a recipient of the message, an urgent status is determined for the voice-mail message, a signal is sent for activating a message waiting indicator for the recipient, and a call is generated to the message recipient for delivering the message. A call is generated to the message recipient immediately after a telephone line for the recipient becomes not busy when the telephone line for the message recipient is busy. Similarly, a call is generated to the message recipient based on a predetermined schedule when the call generated to the message recipient is unanswered. The predetermined schedule includes a predetermined call retry interval and a predetermined call retry duration.