System information

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
The default version of the /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf file requires a few tweaks in order
to provide a configuration that will be suitable to most situations.
We’ll begin by going through the various options you can define in voicemail.conf, and
then we’ll provide a sample configuration file with the settings we recommend for most
deployments.
The voicemail.conf file contains several sections where parameters can be defined. The
following sections detail all the options that are available.
The [general] Section
The first section, [general], allows you to define global settings for your voicemail
system. The available options are listed in Table 8-1.
Table 8-1. [general] section options for voicemail.conf
Option Value/Example Notes
format wav49|gsm|wav For each format listed, Asterisk will create a separate recording in
that format whenever a message is left. The benefit of this is that
some transcoding steps may be saved if the stored format is the same
as the codec used on the channel. We like wav because it is the
highest quality, and wav49 because it is nicely compressed and easy
to email. We don’t like gsm due to it’s scratchy sound, but it enjoys
some popularity.
a
serveremail user@domain When an email is sent from Asterisk, this is the email address that it
will appear to come from.
b
attach yes,no If an email address is specified for a mailbox, this determines whether
the messages is attached to the email (if not, a simple message
notification is sent).
maxmsg 9999 By default Asterisk will only allow a maximum of 100 messages to
be stored per user. For users who delete messages, this is no problem.
For people who like to save their messages, this space can get eaten
up quickly. With the size of hard drives these days, you could easily
store thousands of messages for each user, so our current thinking
is to set this to the maximum and let the users manage things from
there.
maxsecs 0 This type of setting was useful back in the days when a large voicemail
system might have only 40 MB
c
of storage: it was necessary to limit
the system because it was easy to fill up the hard drive. This setting
can be annoying to callers (although it does force them to get to the
point, so some people like it). Nowadays, with terabyte drives be-
coming common, there is no reason not to set this to a high value.
Two considerations are: 1) if a channel gets hung in a mailbox, it’s
good to set some sort of value so it doesn’t stay there for days, but
2) if a user wants to use her mailbox to record notes to herself, she
158 | Chapter 8: Voicemail