[asterisk-users] Changing voicemail.conf file format list

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Monday 13 September 2010 06:07:09 Sebastian wrote:
> On 09/13/2010 11:34 AM, Olivier wrote:
> > In voicemail.conf.sample, you can read this:
> >
> > format=wav49|gsm|wav
> > ; WARNING:
> > ; If you change the list of formats that you record voicemail in
> > ; when you have mailboxes that contain messages, you _MUST_ absolutely
> > ; manually go through those mailboxes and convert/delete/add the
> > ; the message files so that they appear to have been stored using
> > ; your new format list. If you don't do this, very unpleasant
> > ; things may happen to your users while they are retrieving and
> > ; manipulating their voicemail.
> > ;
> > ; In other words: don't change the format list on a production system
> > ; unless you are _VERY_  sure that you know what you are doing and are
> > ; prepared for the consequences.
> >
> >
> >
> > What does "manually go through those mailboxes and convert/delete/add the
> > ; the message files so that they appear to have been stored using
> > ; your new format list" exactly imply here ?
>
> It sounds like you have to shutdown Asterisk, find the old voicemail
> messages stored on the server in their respective directories, and
> convert all of them to the new file/audio format, then modify
> voicemail.conf and then re-start Asterisk. At least that's what it
> sounds like to me. In other words, it seems that Asterisk will get
> confused if it finds old voicemail messages in the storage with a format
> different from what voicemail.conf tells it to expect.

You must also remove all message content with a format that is NOT in your
new list (i.e. if you remove a format from the list, you must also remove all
recordings in the voicemail hierarchy with that format).  And really, this is
the critical step for most messages.  I believe only forwarding messages with
prepend would be a problem for not creating new files.

> I suppose if you go and delete all the old voicemail messages before
> changing the format in voicemail.conf, it will work equally well.
> However, your users might not be very pleased :-)

That will also work.

-- 
Tilghman Lesher
Digium, Inc. | Senior Software Developer
twitter: Corydon76 | IRC: Corydon76-dig (Freenode)
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