"Greetingsonly" Voicemail option

Hello,

Is there a way to disable the recorder of the Voicemail application ? This means just play the Busy or Unavailable message and hang up ? This “Greetingsonly” feature exists on others PBX and is usefull when a user just want a easy to personalize failover message.

I didn’t find this kind of options in voicemail.conf so I tried to set maxmsg to zero. Unfortunatly in this case the Voicemail application plays an error message (and returns FAILED), which is not really customer friendly :wink:

Thanks for any hints !
Florent D.

One way is to not use the voicemail at all - instead just play a message and then hang up.

Sure, but using the Voicemail in both cases provides two advantages:

  • It keeps the dialplan simple, as the user failover destination is always the Voicemail application.
  • It gives a unique entry point to all users (those who wants a recorder and those who don’t) when they want to change their greeting messages.

I will look at the app_voicemail.c source file to get a better idea of the way it works.

I would think it would be easier to just play a recorded message for that user, which would then give you more flexibility, after the message is played you could hangup, or dial another extension. You could even setup a menu, so the caller could press 1-9 for something. As far as easier to add to the dialplan, you would just replace the Voicemail line with a Background line…

Thanks for those suggestions.

As I think that the advantages explained before are strong enough to use the Voicemail application, I looked at it and found that supporting maxmsg=0 (greetings only VM) seems easy.

Let’s see if someone is interested by the patch on the asterisk-dev mailing list !