Hi,
I’ve seen the option for using external IMAP storage with FreePBX and Asterisk but I’m not clear on how this is meant to work. I presume it allows the use of an external IMAP server (even MS Exchange?) to store voicemails.
Reading/deleting the voicemail message via the mail client will read/delete the voicemail from Asterisk/FreePBX and turn off the MWI on the extension/set. Likewise reading or deleting voicemail via the telephony interface will cause it to be marked as read and/or deleted from the IMAP server.
I have the following questions:
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How does Asterisk send the voicemail wav file to the external mail server’s mailbox Is this via SMTP?
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Does the voicemail still get stored on the local Asterisk machine as well?
I’m hoping someone with a bigger brain out there can explain this to me
Regards,
I have never used the IMAP voicemail function, but I believe asterisk just acts like an IMAP client to store/access the voicemail as an IMAP folder on the remote server.
I do not believe asterisk keeps a local copy of the voicemail.
What I wonder about using this feature is what happens if the IMAP server is:
- down or temporarily unreachable OR
- user’s quota on the mail server is full
Is the voicemail silently dropped, saved locally, or some sort of voice notification played to the person attempting to leave the message?
I didn’t think you could use IMAP to store mail/voicemail into a mailbox on a remote system. I thought IMAP was only used to access mail in a mailbox - you need another mechanism to get the message into the mailbox in the first place ie SMTP.
I could understand it better if the IMAP server and Asterisk were on the same machine and asterisk and the IMAP server shared a common mail store.