Voicemail messages on the iPhone are stored in the AMR format (playable by Quicktime), and if you need to back up your messages you can do so using the method below.

Firstly you’ll need to Jailbreak your iPhone so you can get remote access to it via SSH. Download and use PwnageTool as per these instructions to Jailbreak the iPhone, then open Cydia and install the OpenSSH package if it hasn’t been installed already.

Launch the Settings app on the iPhone, choose “Wi-Fi“, then turn “Wi-Fi” on and connect the iPhone to your Wi-Fi network (or create a Wi-Fi network on your Mac by clicking the Airport icon in the menubar and choosing “Create Network…“, then connect the iPhone to that).

After the device connects to the network, tap the blue right-pointing arrow next to your Wi-Fi network entry in the Settings app and make a note of the iPhone’s IP Address on the network.

iphone-sms-settings-wifi

Open a new Terminal window on your Mac, then enter these commands to copy the iPhone’s Voicemail Messages to a “voicemails” folder on your Desktop (replace “{IP_ADDRESS}” with the IP Address you noted above):

mkdir ~/Desktop/voicemails
scp root@{IP_ADDRESS}:/private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail/* ~/Desktop/voicemails/

When you enter the scp command you will be prompted for a password, simply enter the default iPhone root password (‘alpine‘).

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