Pressing 1 does not go to voicemail

General Help
1

Hello. A friend of mine set up FreePBX for me and although it answers calls, I can’t get it to the point where a caller can leave a voicemail after pressing 1. I set up a Virtual Extension for the number 1. Incidentally, pressing *97, or *98 (specified in Admin → Feature Codes) results in “We have not received a valid response, please try again.” If I press 1, I only get silence followed by an eventual hangup.

Is there a log file or other diagnostic output I can provide to help troubleshoot? I’m not doing anything complicated with FreePBX… just creating a general greeting followed by Press 1 to reach voicemail.

2

That’s not how that’s done. You will need to setup a call flow from an inbound rout into an IVR that has option 1 as destination into a voice mailbox.

Watching this series will probably give you an idea of how to setup call flows and auto attendants/IVRs to the point that you’d like to have it.

Edit: Seems like you already asked the same question 11 days ago. I feel like if you’d watched the series as somebody else had linked to it previously you would have been able to setup what you need by now.

3

Thanks. I have already seen that and I have the workflow set up. As far as I can tell, everything is correctly configured according to every video and web tutorial I’ve found. The problem appears to be deeper because other functions seem to work. I can call the number and the IVR plays. So it’s not an issue with the WAV file or its playback. I can press a number on the cellphone’s virtual keypad and it does respond immediately, so it’s not a problem with tones. I’ve shown other screenshots demonstrating the selected configurations and everything appears to be set to what people on the forum have recommended. At this point none of the tutorials have helped to isolate the problem.

4

So the last post in that thread asked you to capture a call log of a call attempt where you weren’t able to leave the VM.

Can you still provide that?

Also, there is no need for the extension to actually be extension 1. The key press in the IVR doesn’t need to correspond to the same extension number.

5

Does the IVR otherwise work? For example, if you set option 1 to route to an extension, does that extension ring?

Does voicemail otherwise work? For example, can you call *201 from an internal phone and get extension’s 201 voicemail?

6

I am not sure that there is an extension 201. Pretty sure they literally created an extension 1.

7

Thanks for checking… I had a friend look at it and he said “app_voicemail.so wasn’t being loaded first, and another module called res_mwi_external.so was being loaded, and preventing the voicemail application from loading”.
I don’t know how it happened but that was the root cause. I would have never figured that out!