Firstly can people stop insisting on this or that functionality is expected in a phone, the N900 is a device that also makes phone calls. If you have a cell sim in your laptop that doesn't make it a phone magically.

The voicemail indicator, as other indicators, is an OPTIONAL part of the standard. Yes, it would be nice to have but you are working with a device that is not supposed to be mass market yet despite what you might like to believe. The carrier also has to support sending the relevant message and if they do then the device needs to support (even if it ignores) all possible messages sent from the carrier too.

As this is not a showstopper I would suspect that this will be a very low level priority. The Maemo team within Nokia is very small compared to the other areas & with all organisations their rival teams with the organisation will be fighting for their position too.

What I do think we should be doing is asking for a clearer and more sensible procedure to highlight functionality that should be included in the platform ratther than loosing it in a bug list. Bugs should be for included functionality that doesn't actually work properly.