Page 182 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

• Default and custom greetings
• The ability to associate phones with more than one mailbox and mailboxes with
more than one phone
• Email notification of voicemail, with the voicemail optionally attached as a sound
file §
• Voicemail forwarding and broadcasts
• Message-waiting indicator (flashing light or stuttered dial tone) on many types of
phones
• Company directory of employees, based on voicemail boxes
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! In this section, we’ll introduce you to the funda-
mentals of a typical voicemail setup.
The voicemail configuration is defined in the configuration file called voicemail.conf.
This file contains an assortment of settings that you can use to customize the voicemail
system to your needs. Covering all of the available options in voicemail.conf would be
beyond the scope of this chapter, but the sample configuration file is well documented
and quite easy to follow. For now, look near the bottom of the file, where voicemail
contexts and voicemail boxes are defined.

Just as dialplan contexts keep different parts of your dialplan separate, voicemail con-
texts allow you to define different sets of mailboxes that are separate from one another.
This allows you to host voicemail for several different companies or offices on the same
server. Voicemail contexts are defined in the same way as dialplan contexts, with square
brackets surrounding the name of the context. For our examples, we’ll be using the
[default] voicemail context.

Creating Mailboxes
Inside each voicemail context, we define different mailboxes. The syntax for defining
a mailbox is:
mailbox => password,name[,email[,pager_email[,options]]]
Let’s explain what each part of the mailbox definition does:
mailbox
This is the mailbox number. It usually corresponds with the extension number of
the associated set.
password
This is the numeric password that the mailbox owner will use to access her voice-
mail. If the user changes her password, the system will update this field in the
voicemail.conf file.

§ No, you really don’t have to pay for this—and yes, it really does work.

154 | Chapter 6: More Dialplan Concepts