I think because I use VoIP ATA adaptors sometimes “voicemails” are nothing more than the sound of the dialtone for about 5s. I think this happens when the caller hangs up after having listened to “the beep” and either the ATA or FreePBX or Asterisk doesn’t react in time to terminate the call.
Anyway that isn’t the issue, really.
To negate that (it’s annoying to have voicemails that aren’t actually voicemails) I’ve set a minimum length for voicemails “Min Message Length (Seconds): 5”
However when I dial *24 (say) to go directly to the voicemail for extension 24, I get the beep, I start recording a message (and I can see the call duration on the hardphone says 00:10) in the Asterisk logs it says
[2020-06-15 15:44:57] VERBOSE[11761][C-00000878] app_voicemail.c: Recording the message
[2020-06-15 15:44:57] VERBOSE[11761][C-00000878] app.c: x=0, open writing: /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/default/24/tmp/Me0VrB format: wav, 0x7f00c0276da8
[2020-06-15 15:45:06] VERBOSE[11761][C-00000878] app.c: User hung up
[2020-06-15 15:45:06] VERBOSE[11761][C-00000878] app_voicemail.c: Recording was 4 seconds long but needs to be at least 5 - abandoning
and bear in mind this is happening on a message I know is at least 8 seconds long (taking into account “the beep”).
Wow, just tried it again, this time setting up an inbound route from my mobile - it’s woefully inaccurate. I left a 7 second voicemail and Asterisk/FreePBX just binned it deciding it was under 3 seconds long. I’ve just totally deleted the setting.
I cringe to think how many voicemails left in good faith our system has binned…
You phone is going to show you how the long the call lasted. Which means that once the call is answered/connected it’s going to start timing it. So you have the enter greeting, beep and such to account for your call time.
The Asterisk CDRs have both the call duration and “billable” duration. The call duration will be how long the call was in the dialplan and Asterisk. The “billable” duration is from when the call was bridged until disconnected.
This setting is for the minimum duration of the voicemail being recorded this means that the recording has to X seconds long. You have it set to 5 seconds, the recording was 4 seconds. It’s not a valid recording due to your settings.
Basically the timer only counts after the beep and recording starts everything else, call duration, etc. is irrelevant.