asterisk users - Jan 2004 - Expire old voice mail messages, et al

I have Asterisk deliver all voice mail to users as email attachments.

I found by accident that there is a limit of 99 messages in your INBOX in 
Asterisk.
The 100th attempt to record a voice mail causes the system to play your 
greeting and then never record the 100th message and silently disconnect 
the caller.

So...is it safe to simply use the UNIX find command to delete any files in 
the INBOX directory that are older than X days old?

I did not know if Asterisk would lose track of which message number was 
next...or otherwise screw up the mail box by doing this.

If my use of a daily cron like this:
/usr/bin/find /var/spool/asterisk/vm/33/INBOX/* -mtime +15 -exec rm {} \;
is a bad idea...perhaps having a message retention period defined in 
voicemail.conf on a global or per user basis.

Any thought of having maximum number of messages be defined globally in 
voicemail.conf or on a per user basis?

Also, does anyone feel a need to have the voicemail system speak the date 
and time the voice mail message arrived for those that access messages by 
phone instead of the usual email?

Finally...am I the only person who does not have a need for separate busy 
and no answer outgoing messages?  When I change my greeting...I change the 
not available...and have a cron job copy the unavailable to the busy file 
so the messages are the same.

Thanks.

---
Jeff Crews
Eastern Oregon Net, Inc.
La Grande Oregon
Email jcrews@eoni.com
Voice 541-963-2625 or 800-785-7873,  extension 11
personal efax 503-907-6704
standard company fax 541-962-7818
web http://www.eoni.com

> I found by accident that there is a limit of 99 messages in your INBOX in
> Asterisk.
> The 100th attempt to record a voice mail causes the system to play your
> greeting and then never record the 100th message and silently disconnect
> the caller.
>
> So...is it safe to simply use the UNIX find command to delete any files in
> the INBOX directory that are older than X days old?
>
> I did not know if Asterisk would lose track of which message number was
> next...or otherwise screw up the mail box by doing this.
>
> If my use of a daily cron like this:
> /usr/bin/find /var/spool/asterisk/vm/33/INBOX/* -mtime +15 -exec rm {} \;
> is a bad idea...perhaps having a message retention period defined in
> voicemail.conf on a global or per user basis.
message-expire.pl in contrib/scripts
> Any thought of having maximum number of messages be defined globally in
> voicemail.conf or on a per user basis?
Not per user but yes it should be a config option.
> Also, does anyone feel a need to have the voicemail system speak the date
> and time the voice mail message arrived for those that access messages by
> phone instead of the usual email?
It already does this.  Are you running the latest cvs?
> Finally...am I the only person who does not have a need for separate busy
> and no answer outgoing messages?  When I change my greeting...I change the
> not available...and have a cron job copy the unavailable to the busy file
> so the messages are the same.
Maybe a config option to make it automatically copy it over for you.

bkw

Hi!
> Also, does anyone feel a need to have the voicemail system speak the
> date and time the voice mail message arrived for those that access
> messages by phone instead of the usual email? 
Did you look at voicemail.conf and the tz= settings? Simply create a 
timezone that fits your needs.
> Finally...am I the only person who does not have a need for separate busy 
> and no answer outgoing messages?
That's especially true when a non-registered SIP client is reported as 
"on the phone"... anyway you have full control over this in your
dialplan
through Voicemail(1000) = no announcement or Voicemail(b1000) or 
Voicemail(u1000).

Cheers, Philipp

Jeff Crews wrote:
[snip]
> Any thought of having maximum number of messages be defined globally
> in voicemail.conf or on a per user basis?
>
I think this is a good idea.  But instead of the two extremes, maybe we
could come up with a "class of service" definition (idea shamelessly
stolen
from Nortel).  That way, we could define how long each of the message
parameters can be, i.e. how many MB of messages, how big of greetings, etc.
> Also, does anyone feel a need to have the voicemail system speak the
> date and time the voice mail message arrived for those that access
> messages by phone instead of the usual email?
>
Yes.  We need that.  And it seems to work on last testing, if we set the
time zone.  I'll have to check it again.
> Finally...am I the only person who does not have a need for separate
> busy and no answer outgoing messages?  When I change my greeting...I
> change the not available...and have a cron job copy the unavailable
> to the busy file so the messages are the same.
If you have no need for different messages, then change your
extensions.conf, and set them both to go to (uXXXX), instead of one going to
(bXXXX) and the other going to (uXXXX).

Hope this helps,
David Gomillion