I am a novice at the FreePBX world and I have installed 2.10 version on my VMWare server. I have been successful at setting up all aspects of the system but one function eludes me. That’s the voicemail notification sending e-mails to my internal Exchange 2010 server.
FreePBX is using the SendEmail Mail Server to send. I can receive e-mails successfully when I change the e-mail notification address in the extension list to my external gmail account it works perfectly. But when I use my internal email address [email protected]. It fails with the error message in the mail queue:
Ok I found the reason why it is not sending. I check the log in my Exchange server and it is NOT reaching the server. When I look at the log in SendMail Server it list:
Activating Email Delivery of Voicemail Messages. We’ve previously shown how to configure systems to reliably deliver email messages whenever a voicemail arrives unless your ISP happens to block downstream SMTP mail servers. Here’s the link in case you need it. As it happens, you really don’t have to use a real fully-qualified domain name to get this working. So long as the entry (such as pbx.dyndns.org) is inserted in both the /etc/hosts file and /etc/asterisk/vm_general.inc with a matching servermail entry of [email protected] (as explained in the link above), your system will reliably send emails to you whenever you get a voicemail if you configure your extensions in freePBX to support this capability. You can, of course, put in real host entries if you prefer. For 90% of the systems around the world, if you just want your server to reliably e-mail you your voicemail messages, make line 3 of /etc/hosts look like this with a tab after 127.0.0.1 and spaces between the domain names:
Now issue the following two commands to make the changes take effect:
service network restart
amportal restart
The command “setup-mail” can be used from the Linux prompt to set the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) of the mail that is sent out from your server. This may help mail to be delivered from the PBX. One of things mail servers do to reduce spam is to do a reverse lookup on where the mail has come from, checking that there is actually a mailserver at the other end. You can only do this if you have set up dynamic DNS or if you have pointed a hostname at your fixed IP address. Once you have done this, and assuming your ISP is cooperative, then you will receive your voicemails via email if you wish (this is set within FreePBX),and your PBX will email you when FreePBX needs an update. You set this feature in FreePBX General Settings.
If your hosting provider blocks downstream SMTP servers to reduce spam, here’s a link on the PBX in a Flash forum to get you squared away.