Voicemail to email - am I going crazy?

FreePBX Configuration
1

I’m gradually building up a project system using FreePBX 17.0.19.27. completely free, the ultimate goal is to link a rural analogue VHF radiotelephone system into it. Quite fun.

I am 110% certain that a few months ago I successfully configured voicemail-to-email, so that a voicemail would be forwarded to a user’s email address as a .wav attachment.

however I cannot now find anywhere in the fpbx GUI where I can possibly have set up my SMTP email server account’s credentials for sending these emails.!! googling indicates that I need the paid-for System Admin module.
is this true? I definitely havent paid for the System Admin module, so how did I possibly do this? I feel like Im going crazy.
was there a free-for-a-month facility on the System Admin/ email functionality which has now expired? I dont recall this.

in a similar vein, I cannot find a way within the fPBX GUI of recording voicemail .wav’s. it looks as thought you can only do this from actual extensions, but this seems mental. if I can record System Recordings within fPBX then surely I can manipulate my user’s voicemail recordings?

At the same time as I configured the VM-to-eml thing for free, I successfully recorded customised voicemail unavailable greeting messages. (they are still working) I also cannot remember how I did this.

Also at the same time as doing this, I configured a small IVR system within fpbx. this is still working. (it was an effective way of multiplexing a number of different “stations” onto one paid-for SIP trunk) - this too is still working.

I have a vague recollection that the voicemail-to-email function may have been a workaround using the IVR ? stupidly I seem to not have documented what I did when I did it! (I usually do)

2

So the Paid System Admin Pro, definitely gives you a step by step on setting up authentication to SMTP, however this is pretty easily do-able in terminal and your mail clients config files. I am wondering if the reason it isn’t working is googles smtp security changes they made, that no longer allows “Less secure apps” to sign into a gmail SMTP… your time line of a few months, quite possibly lines up with this fairly recent restriction.

3

I was not able to configure outgoing mail via the freepbx webUI. Though I may not have had the necessary module installed.
I instead configured the system’s postfix relayhost. Asterisk already wanted to use mailserver on the localhost. You will also need to configure postfix’s smtp_sasl_* options if your upstream mailserver requires authentication.

4

yeah, I did do it with the postfix subsystem when I had success earlier in the year. I just found a scribbled note to self.
so that does answer that, thanks all.
are there any decent howto’s for doing this lately?
cheers

5

I’ve used the howto in the postfix docs Enabling SASL authentication in the Postfix SMTP/LMTP client
Following that is also the sender dependent config which allows for selecting the relay/username/password based on the FROM address.