Example

In this basic example we will show you:

Requirements - this tutorial is the continuation of VoiceMail example 1. This means that we will use the configuration files (the SIP/IAX2 accounts,the mailbox accounts and the extensions) that were set up there. Here are the configuration files from previos example:

How to send notification messages - in order to change a notification message we will need a working mail application (for this example we will use sendmail). Check if you have already installed sendmail.
For Fedora:

For Debian:


If you don't have sendmail installed (or other application with the same functions - sending mails) you should install it by using either `yum` or `rpm` for Fedora, and `apt-cache` and `apt-get` or `dpkg` for Debian. This example won't cover the installation of those utilities. However if you feel difficulties check sendmail, qmail and postfix home pages.

Returning to Asterisk. By default Asterisk uses "/usr/bin/sendmail -t" as mail application if you are using different mail application or your path is different you should specify it by using `mailcmd` keyword. In our tutorial we will use the same location but we will specify it in order to show how to use this keyword.


In order to send a notification message to a certain user we will have to specify his/hers e-mail address. For our example we will use our imaginary company's mail server named mail.company.com


Let's test it out. In the Asterisk console type `dial 101@internal`. This command will dial extension `101` from the `internal` context. If you have registered your account from your phone, do not answer it. When you see that the voicemail has started recording the messages type `hangup`


And here is the result in our mail:


How to send the audio message as an attachment? Asterisk sends the mail with attachment only if the `attach` keyword's value is set to `yes` for the current account (specified either by general or by per-user option). Asterisk sends the first format specified in `format` keyword. In our configuration file this will be the `wav49` format. However we can override this by specifying one of the other formats (that are been specified) with the keyword `attachfmt`. Additionally we will specify attachfmt per-user to the two mailboxes in [bosses] context.


And here is the result:



How to customize our notification mails - there are ways to customize the notification messages that we are sending. We can adjust almost everything related to the message. We can change the Subject of the mail, the mail's body, the sender, the date format... We are going to use every possible keyword that customize the message. However you may prefer to let some things in their default settings.Here is the example of the customization that we made:


In our example we are saving two formats. A typical voicemail message with length of about one minute will take about 150KB per file, which makes a 300KB per message. Let every account have approximately twenty messages saved. This makes 6MB per account. We have fourteen accounts which makes approximately 84MB. Now imagine you have one hundred mailboxes, not just fourteen. This will make about 600MB... How about one thousand accounts? Note that we are not saving the large audio formats as wav. We have to make some restrictions in order to reduce the large amount of disk space needed.


Dealing with many account might cause you lot's of trouble. Especially when it is up to managing `extensions.conf`. Here we will offer you a solution which will simplify the problem. If we look at our extensions.conf we will note that we are creating these extensions for every user:

	exten => 0***,1,Answer()
	exten => 0***,2,VoiceMailMain(****@*******)
	exten => 0***,3,HangUp()

	exten => ***,1,Dial(****/*****)
	exten => ***,2,VoiceMail(****@*******)
	exten => ***,3,HangUp()

How about writing one line for each account? We will use two macros in order to achieve a shorter and easier way of adding new accounts. One of the macros will handle the internal communication between the accounts, the other one will handle the voicemail applications (VoiceMailMain() extension). Since our accounts' names are not numbers and have nothing in common between the accounts' usernames, their mailbox number and their extension we will use variables defined in the [global] section of extensions.conf in order to specify the relation between the mailbox account, the extension number and the SIP or IAX2 account. Here are the macros:


And here are the variable declarations:


Note that we have removed/commented the whole [voicemail] the whole [internal] context and we have added these two extensions, which matches per extension and starts the macros:


With this final step we have finished this example. Here are the files after the final editions:
- iax.conf
- sip.conf
- extensions.conf
- voicemail.conf

We will use this example as start point for our next example (in progress) example.