That voicemails are not subject to roaming charges within the EU is a quite recent thing, and I'm not sure if it's a result of regulation or if the operators have just pre-empted being forced to do it. When roaming outside of the EU, you can still expect to get hit with massive charges for receiving voicemail.
It's result of a quirk of how voicemail calls get routed: If you set up call diversion to your voicemail with your network, you'd not pay anything.
But if you fail to answer, or divert calls to voicemail with your phone, the calls would get routed to the network your phone is active in, you'd fail to answer, and the call would get routed back by the operator you're roaming with, rather than having that operator somehow just signal that the calls should be diverted at source, and you'd get to pay for the pleasure.
At least that's the excuse the operators used. Of course it was particularly shitty that they'd charge people extortionate rates due to shortcomings of the way they do call routing.