Voicemail Aging

newer versions of MTE do not record 3 copies, they just use wav49 (the format used in the email attachment). This only applies to new installations, you'd have to change your own voicemail.conf to use just wav49. If you change to wav49 you need to delete all .wav and .gsm files otherwise customers will complain about changing greetings and still hearing old messages. Did you re-define maxmsg or is it still the default of 100? A full mailbox, customers automatically react to and are used to dealing with. The biggest culprits usually realize they have been so spoiled by vm->email that once their mailbox fills up the first time, they opt for the delete=1 option in their user portal.

Thanks, Erik. I guess I was hoping to put together something that is kind of middle ground on the voicemail thing. I think some of our folks are relying on voicemail to email, and there is a tendancy to leave the messages on the asterisk side if you're not logging in there to listen to them. But, some folk do check messages by phone, so I don't want to automatically delete them. I guess we could deal with it during setup and ask them to choose either email or phone/portal.

But, my thought was to tell my customer that any messages left over 30 or so days will be purged. We may write a shell script to so that, and I will post it in the Scripts forum if we do.

Thanks for the clarification on the vm message format thing. I'm going to turn off gsm and wav and delete the .wav and .gsm files.

sounds good, your biggest problem with expiring the old messages is all the sequential renaming of audio files and the .txt header files. I took the easier way out and just limit the total number of messages. In theory, the could keep a message for 2 yrs if they wanted, just as long as they kept deleting other messages to keep the message count below their maximum. It's been my unfortunate experience that, at least with my customers, despite telling them there is a mechanism in place that expires message >30days age; they still call in irate and yell directly at the CEO about this 'injustice'; who then calls me into a meeting of no less than 2hrs; whereby I spend the time re-explaining why I can't just get something off a backup tape somewhere and placate the customer and it not re-delete itself again at midnight or in another 30days.

re that last part about irate customers not understand what you tell them and 2 hr meetings to explain why you can't recreate data.... I work for the government. I'm used to it! ;->

Thanks!