[Asterisk-Dev] MWI indications and AGI Voicemail

[Brian Cuthie]

 From the discussions on this group, it looks like a lot of people are 
working pretty hard on various voicemail enhancements or changes. But as 
a core app of Asterisk this seems fraught with peril. For one thing, 
it's going to be difficult for organizations to keep their voicemail 
implementations in sync with Asterisk as it evolves. And, the 
implementation of app_voicemail has gotten pretty bulky, including stuff 
to deal with sendmail (!).

I keep thinking voicemail should be an AGI script. Along those lines I 
would love to see MWI handled a little differently. Right now, it's 
directly tied to the current vm implementation at the file system level 
through ast_app_messagecount(). But this then ties all of Asterisk to a 
particular voicemail file layout, if not implementation.

One suggestion I have is to move MWI status into db. Then any app could 
set the MWI for a mailbox directly allowing external AGI-driven 
voicemail implementations, of which I suspect we'd see some pretty good 
ones.

-brian