asterisk users - Sep 2006 - Experiences, Tips on Voicemail storage using ODBC or IMAP?

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Hey all,

I'm looking into setting up a system or two with either IMAP or ODBC
storage of Voicemail messages and wanted to hear about your experiences,
gather tips or warnings, etc, before I go diving too deep into it. Are
either of those storage methods working reliably for any of you? What
are some of the issues you had to deal with when setting it up? What's
the performance like? You get the general idea...

Quick stats on base test systems:

Latest SVN trunk as of this morning
Gentoo
MySQL 5.0
Realtime sip and iax peers/users
Realtime sip/iax/voicemail config
LARGE dialplan

Thanks in advance for any input,
SKM

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On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 08:39:21AM -0400, Rushowr wrote:
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> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Hey all,
> 
> I'm looking into setting up a system or two with either IMAP or ODBC
> storage of Voicemail messages and wanted to hear about your experiences,
> gather tips or warnings, etc, before I go diving too deep into it. Are
> either of those storage methods working reliably for any of you? What
> are some of the issues you had to deal with when setting it up? What's
> the performance like? You get the general idea...
What does "imap storage" mean? Does Asterisk write directly to the
mailboxes or does it connect solely as an imap cliet? Or both?

One other thing: I remember that there is something I disliked about the
mbx format: last time I looked closely it was practically unsupported by
anything other than the tools of the WU distributions.

Looking ay Debian now I see just two packages that seem to be aware of
mbx folders (archmsg and mailsync). I also see that the version of
c-client in Debian is 2002 (!).

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         sip:tzafrir@local.xorcom.com
icq#16849755          iax:tzafrir@local.xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406          jabber:tzafrir@jabber.org
tzafrir.cohen@xorcom.com     http://www.xorcom.com

Rushowr wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hey all,
>
> I'm looking into setting up a system or two with either IMAP or ODBC
> storage of Voicemail messages and wanted to hear about your experiences,
> gather tips or warnings, etc, before I go diving too deep into it. Are
> either of those storage methods working reliably for any of you? What
> are some of the issues you had to deal with when setting it up? What's
> the performance like? You get the general idea...
>
> Quick stats on base test systems:
>
> Latest SVN trunk as of this morning
> Gentoo
> MySQL 5.0
> Realtime sip and iax peers/users
> Realtime sip/iax/voicemail config
> LARGE dialplan
>
> Thanks in advance for any input,
> SKM
>
>
>   
I've got a small asterisk (trixbox) system running at home as well as a 
Cyrus IMAP server handling the family's email, not on the same machine, 
but that is certainly possible.  The IMAP server has been running for 
years on several different versions of RedHat and Fedora.  I've had no 
major problems.  Once in a while the DB that IMAP uses needs conversion 
when there is a major version change, but it's pretty simple.  Cyrus 
IMAP does not use mbox format.  Each email is saved in an individual 
file.  For instance my asterisk-users folder has 11430 files.  My 
personal opinion is that the access to individual files, indexed via a 
DB is faster than the mbox method of saving all of the mail in a single 
file.  Client IMAP  support is very good in Thuderbird and Evolution on 
the Linux side and outlook, outlook express and thunderbird on the 
windows side.

Cyrus IMAP is a little finicky to set up, but once it's all running it's
pretty smooth.

dovecot is another IMAP server that supports both maildir and mbox 
formats.  I don't know anything else about it, other than it's the 
default for Fedora.

Hope that helps.

Bob...