[asterisk-dev] app_vocemail, IMAP, shared voicemail boxes

[Mark Michelson]

Howard Wilkinson wrote:
> I have set up a Cyrus server to provide IMAP service to an asterisk 
> server. I am using this to provide a shared voicemail facility for a 
> number of phones. This is set up with an entry for each phone in the 
> voicemail.conf file as follows.
> 
> 6999 => 6999,Company shared 
> mailbox,company at company.com,,|imapuser=companymailbox
> 6998 => 6998,Company shared 
> mailboz,company at company.com,,|imapuser=companymailbox
> 
> There is a master user set up for the imap as
> 
> authuser = administrator
> authpassword = password
> 
> This is working and messages can be left for all of the extensions, they 
> all appear in the single mailbox and MWI is working. BUT when I try to 
> retrieve the messages then I can only retrieve them from the phone that 
> the message was left for. I.E. 6999 messages can only be retrieved if I 
> dial into 6999 mailbox.
> 
> What I would like if to be able to dial in from any of the extensions 
> and retrieve all messages in the mailbox.
> 
> The problem would seem to stem from the line(s) in app_voicemail.c that 
> search for "X-Asterisk-VM-Extension" headers. This uses the mailbox 
> number of the dial in user to search the mailbox.
> 
> I propose a change that would allow the mailbox number for messages to 
> be set when they are being left and when they are being read from a 
> configuration option such as 'imapmboxid=6999' to be what this header 
> gets set to and gets searched on.
> 
> If this looks like the right thing to do then I will prepare a patch and 
> submit it to the list. Also, if required I will submit a bug report if 
> somebody wants to assign this to me I will then keep up to date any 
> experiences reported.
> 
> I hope this is the right etiquette for improvements to the asterisk base.
> 
> Regards, Howard.
> 

I'm not sure I understand the use of such an option. To me, it doesn't make 
sense to be able to get 6998's voicemail when logging into 6999's mailbox. For 
the use case you have described, I'm not sure why you couldn't use just one 
shared mailbox instead of two.

By the way, the typical path for proposing patches is to use the Asterisk bug 
tracker at http://bugs.digium.com. Create a bug report and list the severity as 
"feature" to indicate that you are proposing a new feature. Discussion regarding 
the addition of new features is perfect for this list, though.

Mark Michelson