[asterisk-users] Experiences, Tips on Voicemail storage using ODBC or IMAP?

[Bob Chiodini]

Rushowr wrote:
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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
>
>
>   
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...