Delayed Voicemail Notification

FreePBX Endpoints
1

I have a FreePBX 100 system in place with 76 phones currently deployed. Most are Cisco 7960 phones, flashed with SIP firmware. I also purchased Sangoma S305, 405, 500, and 705 phones for various people.

During the past week, I’ve had two problems brought to my attention, both to do with voice mail. Nobody has been able to get me details on the one, so I’m only going to focus on the one I do have information about. I’m going to provide a very brief overview of the one I do not have details about, just in case they are somehow related.

Vague problem: Calls come in and are transferred somewhere. The customer leaves a voice mail. Nobody ever gets the voice mail and nothing is done until the customer calls back mad that we didn’t return their voice mail. <------ This is literally everything I know about this currently; no DIDs, dates, times, source numbers - nothing. :expressionless: :roll_eyes:

Main problem: Two different people have told me that the voicemail notification light on their phone did not turn on when a message was left, but only several hours later. Coincidentally or not, both have Sangoma S405 phones. One person has no details, but has said it’s happened multiple times. The other says it’s only happened to him once in the ~6 months we’ve had this phone system and was able to give me the date, approximate times, phone number of the customer, and extension the voice mail was left on. :smiley:

Using this information, I was able to find the call in both the call recordings and call detail records. The call recording has only an 11 second recording of our operator greeting the customer and our hold music, not the customer leaving the voice mail. Multiple CDR records have the speaker next to them, but when I play this on any of the CDRs, it only plays the same 11 second recording as in the call recording module. The final CDR for the call shows it going to the VoiceMail app and is 29 second long, yet if I click on the speaker icon next to the CDR, it again plays the same 11 second recording. :confounded:

According to John (and the CDR), the customer left the voice mail at 12:32. However, when John left his office around 1:00, there was no indication of a message waiting on his phone. He returned to his office around 5:00 and immediately saw the MWI light on, checked the voice mail, and saw it was left much earlier. I can find no CDR of his checking his voice mail later in the day, but frankly am not all that great at searching CDRs & have no reason to doubt what he has told me.

Does anyone have any ideas of why the MWI light might be delayed like this?

2

Advanced setting of all of your extensions.
Change MWI Subscribe type from Auto to Unsolicited.

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image1320×121 19.4 KB

You can change it for all Extensions using the Bulk Handler.
Export all your extensions, open the file, change the column and then repimport.

You can also update MySQL directly

fwconsole mysql
# paste this
UPDATE `sip` SET `data` = 'unsolicited',`flags` = 25 WHERE `keyword` = 'mwi_subscription';
# exit MySQL
quit
# Then reload FreePBX.
fwconsole reload
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Thank you for such a complete answer @sorvani !

I do not have that option in my GUI, most likely because I bought the HA version of FreePBX & therefore are stuck on version 13. I do see the mwi_subscription settings in the mysql database, but hesitate to change it without knowing more of what it does or what else it might effect. (Particularly since it happens so infrequently & has not effected any of the Cisco phones.) I can read the help you included in the screenshot, but frankly don’t understand what I’m reading. :slightly_frowning_face:

I’ve searched online, but have yet to find a better explanation - do you know where I might find one?

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I found the following in the Basefile Editor under the Endpoint Manager… still doesn’t tell me what it actually does, but think it might at least allow me to change it on an extension-by-extension basis.

P99 __line1Mwi__  # Subscribe for MWI.0 - no,do not send SUBSCRIBE for Message Waiting Indication, 1 - yes,send periodical SUBBSCRIBE for ,Message Waiting indication
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That is the phone setting. That is completely separate from the Extension settings that I pointed out.

1 Like
6

You can either use unsolicited on extension or have the phone subsribe and tell it how often to check in. Different strokes for different folks.

7

Apparently I was misinformed of the nature of the issue.

One of my users checked her voice mail this morning and deleted all of them as she recorded the information contained in each. When she left for lunch, she had none stored. When she returned from lunch, she started going through her voice mails and sandwiched between two messages that were both left while she was gone, was a message from last night at 5:04 pm! I checked the CDRs on the server and the only call we received from that number for this month was indeed yesterday at 5:04 pm.

So it appears that the problem is NOT that the users are simply not being notified that they have voice mail, it’s that the voice mails themselves are not making it into their mailboxes when they are left. This really makes me scratch my head in puzzlement.

Any ideas?

8

Perhaps the message was forwarded by another mailbox owner?

9

or the user missed it.

10

Don’t think it too likely that the user missed it - when she gave me the information, it was in the middle of a list of half a dozen others. If she’d missed it, it would’ve been at the start, having been left the day before.

Being forwarded is a great idea… any idea of how I might confirm/deny that hypothesis? I know the CDRs store just about everything that happens, but the signal:noise ratio is very low… it’s probably how I’m using it, but finding what I’m looking for is nearly impossible.

11

Check /var/log/asterisk/full or /var/log/asterisk/messages files for step-by-step dial plan execution details – increase verbosity if those are not showing you enough information.

12

For the future add

backupdeleted=1000

to your voicemail.conf

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/var/log/asterisk/full gives an INSANE amount of detail - thank you for that tip! Using it, I was able to determine that the voice mail was indeed left at a different extension. I left myself a voice mail and forwarded it to another user (to generate a log), then searched for ‘app_voicemail.c: Copying message from’ in the previous days files and BAM - found the exact time it happened.

Thank you all so much for your input. I am willing to bet that this is going to explain the majority of the reports of voice mails not being received when they’re left. :smiley:

1 Like
14

What effects does this have? I added it to my system yesterday & this morning, had 3 blank voice mails & complaints from others about the same. I know the system will discard voice mail below 2 or 3 seconds ordinarily; it appears as this disables that feature?

15

It creates a folder named Deleted in the extensions vm folder, messages marked read are moved and renumbered into it. The .txt files are what would help you diagnose your problem, it should not affect empty calls which are regulated by minsecs and maxsilence

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Confirmed that the blank voice mails after adding that configuration line must have been a coincidence… First, because I added it back in since and they have not recurred and second, because I initially changed it in the voicemail.conf file and not the GUI, so the config file was overwritten by the GUI & the setting wasn’t actually active for more than about an hour… :unamused: :laughing:

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