Transfer direct to VM not working properly

I’m trying to allow my users to directly transfer an incoming call to another extensions voicemail. From quite a bit of searching on these forums I continue to see that the process should be simple,

  1. Dial ##
  2. Dial *EXT (or *EXT#)
  3. The call is transferred to the users VM directly.

When I follow that process, no matter what EXT on my network that I use, I get a message saying “i’m sorry, that’s not a valid extension” on the caller side. On the extension that I’m transferring from, it appears to go through just fine, but the caller hears " I’m sorry, that’s not a valid extension, please try again" and no matter what you put in the error message loops.

Help please??

FreePBX 2.11.0.38
PBX Firmware: 5.211.65-16
PBX Service Pack: 1.0.0.0
Asterisk 11.12.0

Not enough searching I suggest :slight_smile:

To transfer directly to voicemail just use your phones transfer button to *EXT (no interim ## needed)

No he is using ## to do a transfer that is the default feature code for transfer.

That should work and works on my system.

I’ve actually tried it both ways, either way it does the same thing. tells me that it’s not a valid extension.

Do you have a any other problems with DTMF detection (turn on DTMF logging) is your phone’s dialstring allowing such dials (shouldn’t be a problem when dialing inside a call) , and what codecs are you using?

I used to, before I discovered that that was what was causing a previous error (voicemail passwords ) My grandstreams by default were selecting 3 DTMF options when configured by EPM. Now I have them all set to via RTP (RFC2833)

Direct dialing voice mail can be tricky depending on your extension numbering. When you prefix an extension number with a * it can sometimes conflict with an existing feature code prefix. Give us the sanitzied log entries when you direct dial an extension’s vm.

looks like you hit the nail on the head Igatez. I checked the other feature codes and found one that we weren’t actually using was set to *11 and the EXT that I was trying to transfer to was 114. Disabled the *11 feature code and it appears to be working properly now. Thanks for the push in the right direction!

1 Like

When we do a transfer directly to VM with our Grandstreams we press 5 (pause) Ext. and it works. I don’t know if that’s a Grandstream thing or just works in general.