[Asterisk-Users] Re: Voicemail storage in DB

[Brian Capouch]

Matt White wrote:
> James H. Thompson wrote:
> 
>> Would it make any sense to store the voice mail formatted as a email 
>> msg in a Maildir directory
>> structure.
>> Then you could also retreive them with an email client.
> 
> 
> As an extension of this thought, how about going one step further
> and storing the voicemail on an imap server directly?  It would
> remove the whole storage question and allow storing on a remote
> system.  The tools in the WU-IMAP c-client package would be
> pretty useful...
> 

Two of my students are working on this very project right now.

Some thoughts/caveats:

One design constraint that is mostly enforced in the asterisk code is 
that it run standalone (I think the mpg123 dependency is the sole 
exception) and there was very strong sentiment that anything we do NOT 
require the installation of a whole IMAP suite.  So that complicates 
things somewhere between a little and a lot.  Basically the task is to 
design a maildir type entity that can be completely manipulated within 
the asterisk application itself.

We're still not coding it heavily, but my sense is that the real gotcha 
is going to lie in the IVR access routines.  They'll have to be mapped 
into IMAP-space, as I see things right now, and in looking at the code 
that's already there, that isn't going to be a trivial thing.

There is also the split between the UW orientation (keep the files in 
the maildir owned by the user they're sent to) and the cyrus orientation 
(lock down the IMAP store and require all access to pass through a 
server agent).

I think the maildir approach is the Correct One, but the path thither 
appears to be a least minorly studded with complexity.

My HO, of course.

Thx.

B.