asterisk users - Apr 2008 - multiple simultaneous access to single voice mail box

We are using Asterisk 1.2.18 at this site. One of the users brought this
to my attention today.

"We have a problem when we take the message off the voice mail. If I am
taking off the messages it used to be [on the old phone system] that no
one else was able to go in & take off the message. Now I can be taking
off the messages & some one else can also be taking off the same
messages. We should not be able to do this!!"

Has anyone else seen this? Is there a way to setup the voice mail so
that each box can only be accessed by one person at a time?

Bob

On Wednesday 09 April 2008 17:18:32 Bob Pierce wrote:
> We are using Asterisk 1.2.18 at this site. One of the users brought this
> to my attention today.
>
> "We have a problem when we take the message off the voice mail. If I
am
> taking off the messages it used to be [on the old phone system] that no
> one else was able to go in & take off the message. Now I can be taking
> off the messages & some one else can also be taking off the same
> messages. We should not be able to do this!!"
>
> Has anyone else seen this? Is there a way to setup the voice mail so
> that each box can only be accessed by one person at a time?
There's not a really good way of doing that, not in ways that can't be
subverted.  I imagine that you have one extension for getting into voicemail,
no matter which mailbox you retrieve from.

If you instead use a separate extension, you can use groups to restrict the
number of people accessing a particular mailbox:

exten => 123,1,Set(GROUP()=123)
exten => 123,n,GotoIf($[${GROUP_COUNT()} > 1]?busy)
exten => 123,n,VoicemailMain(123 at shared)
exten => 123,n,Hangup
exten => 123,n(busy),Busy

-- 
Tilghman