Two Users Listening to Same Voicemail

Is there a way to limit the number of people listening to a voicemail message at one time?

Assuming you are asking if no more than X people can listen to the same voicemail at the same time… If there was a way it would involve multiple behind the scenes tweaks working together, outside of the scope of Asterisk/FreePBX. What problem are you ultimately trying to solve? There may be alternative approaches.

@comtech Thank you for the reply. My team is frustrated when more than one of them listens to the same voice mail message at the same time (or one starts and the other starts a few minutes later), then they both try to call the same client back. It leads to wasted time and confusion on the part of the client. Perhaps another approach would be to ask if the system could announce “no new messages” when someone has already started to listen to the message.

What about having the voicemails emailed to a shared email box? When a user is “working the voicemail” they can flag the email, or move it to a different location.

There is the commercial voicemail notify module which allows new messages to generate notification calls in order so that one specific person can handle it.

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https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FPG/VM+Notify

The OP is asking to ‘avoid concurrent access’, this is a little harder as Comedian mail is a monolithic bolt-on to Asterisk, but it does mean that it is separate from FreePBX/Asterisk, only relying on the ‘instantaneous’ state of /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail directory structure and the content of /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf.

One suggestion is to setup a systemd ‘path’ service to monitor read access to /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/default/(sharedvm)/INBOX/msg000.* which would indicate that someone is ‘in’ that mailbox, and then use AMI to send notify sip NOTIFY messages to all users that there are no voicemails, thereby turning off the MWI’s, they will turn on automatically later on activity. There will be a little hysteresis with this solution though.

Another is that you could temporarily change the shared box’ password, preventing other users access but not the reception of new messages, until reverted .

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