Reply from Voicemail Issue

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi All,

First I want to thank the members of this board. The support here has been great, and most of my questions are answered after reading the posts.

However, I do have a problem which is not listed… so I am hoping someone has this same issue.

When a user calls into their VM box and tries to reply to a VM from another user (Whom called into their mailbox from a cellphone!), they receive the following message:

“you cannot reply to this message because the sender does not have a mailbox”

I would understand if the person who left the voicemail was some random caller just leaving a message, but this individual actually called into his VM box on our system. Once he was in the system, he dialed Option 3, then Option 4 to create a message.

I am assuming that this is a caller-id issue, but I cannot think of any other place to look. (I have spent the last 4 hours peering over the Voicemail.Conf file.)

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Mike

BTW… I noticed using Option 3, Then Option 4… you cannot leave a VM message for yourself. Is this normal? :confused:

2

Mike,

Looks like the voicemail captures the external caller id, and then dials that exact number, NPA-NXX-XXXX. Unless you have built into your user’s dialplan a way for that number to be manipulated to add your dial prefix, ex. 8 or 9 usually, the system will treat the call as internal, and reach a somewhat cryptic message related to an invalid ext. The message appears to vary depending on how the call is placed, whether dialed directly or as a reply to a voicemail.

You could test this on your system by manually dialing the external cell number from an internal ext to see if the call completes.

Also, it is fairly common for voicemail systems to disallow messages to be left from an ext for itself.

David