Managing Voicemail Deletion in Blast Groups on FreePBX

Is it possible to configure FreePBX so that when one member of a blast group deletes a voicemail, it is also removed from the voicemail inboxes of the other group members? We have a situation where multiple people receive the same voicemail, and if one person answers and deletes it, the others still have the message, leading to repeated callbacks. Is there a way to avoid this redundancy by ensuring that once one member deletes the voicemail, it is deleted for the entire group?

It does not seem possible by clicking some buttons in FreePBX, no, but you might be able to automate some of it with a script that approximates the following:

  1. iterates over the message information text files in each of the blast group user mailboxes, including each folder because the users may have moved things around (automatic shuffling of heard messages from INBOX to Old folders for example)
  2. checks their context=app-vmblast and origmailbox=5555 (or whatever the first extension is)
  3. then stores all the msg_id= lines from each of those matching txt’s
  4. compares the msg_id’s to remove all those with perfect matches across every one of the group’s individual user mailboxes
  5. finally takes the spotty list of msg_id’s that are not present across all boxes in the group and executes the AMI VoicemailRemove action as needed for each affected message in each user mailbox

Another thought would be if you used ODBC voicemail backend with PostgreSQL and setup TRIGGER FUNCTIONS on the table to activate on DELETE operations to perform additional DELETEs based on matches of context, origmailbox, and msg_id columns. (But external manipulation of messages in the database can potentially lead to other issues, although that has improved – personally not tried it out lately.)