asterisk users - Apr 2004 - external voicemail access - solved (mostly)

thanks to those who replied. I have managed to get the functionality I 
was looking for working with a series of Macros. However, it doesn't 
work as simply as I would like. There are two issues I've run into:

(1)Goto provides no way to pass variables between one context and 
another.
(2)I can't find any way to Goto a specific point within a Macro when 
calling it.

Mostly this is a result of the background command listening for 
extensions in the current context. If background is run from within a 
Macro, then it will terminate the macro and return to the current 
context to execute whatever user input was just captured. In order to 
get the behavior I'm looking for (user calls into voicemail, presses * 
to be prompted for a password and check messages, press # to skip the 
greeting and leave a message) I had to have 3 macros:

(1)vm - leave voicemail
(2)vm-nogreet - simply provide a beep
(3)checkmessage

Ideally this would be one larger macro, where the starting point could 
be specified as well as passing the arguments along.

[macro-vm]
exten => s,1,Answer
exten => s,2,Background(${VMAILPATH}/${ARG2}/${ARG1}/unavail)
exten => s,3,VoiceMail2(s${ARG1})
exten => s,4,Hangup

[macro-vm-nogreet]
exten => s,1,Answer
exten => s,2,VoiceMail2(s${ARG1})
exten => s,3,Hangup

[macro-checkmessage]
exten => s,1,VoiceMailMain2(${ARG1})
exten => s,2,Hangup

In the inbound context I do the following (xxxxxxx is the rest of the 
phone number):

[line-in]
exten => xxxxxx1638,1,Dial(${P1}&${P2}&${P3},25,Tr)
exten => xxxxxx1638,2,Macro(vm,${P1_VM},${P1_VM_CONTEXT})
exten => xxxxxx1638,3,Hangup
exten => *,1,Macro(checkmessage,${P1_VM})
exten => i,1,Macro(vm-nogreet,${P1_VM},${P1_VM_CONTEXT})

This does everything in a fairly general way. However, if anyone knows 
how to address my points above this could be done much cleaner in a 
single macro (and if there is a way to keep background isolated within 
the macro it would be easier still). One note - this will actually 
interrupt the greeting and send to the "beep" for voicemail regardless
of what the user presses, as long as it isn't the * key. Since 
background will always bounce to here I thought it would be better to 
force someone to leave voicemail than get a fast busy with an 
inadvertent button press.

-Steve