Voicemail not Working

We are running Asterisk version 1.6.2.17.3 with Freepbx version 2.8.1.4. We are using Aastra 6757i phones. The problem we are having is as follows. On the Aastra phones there is a soft button that connects you to voicemail. It will display the voicemail properly, but when you try and listen to the voicemail all you get is a busy signal. This is what i find in the asterisk logfile.

[Jun 1 10:29:18] NOTICE[3252] chan_sip.c: Call from ‘16’ to extension ‘vmail’ rejected because extension not found in context ‘from-internal’.

Being new to asterisk, i don’t understand what the issue is. I am sure more information will be needed to solve this, but i am unsure what to provide or exactly where to find it. Thanks for the help.

You should ask this question on FreePBX forums. FreePBX generates the dialplan used by asterisk.
Asterisk simply executes it. The GIGO principle :smiley:

I have posted there as well but i get no reply. Can anyone explain to me how context works or why i am getting that error? I am new to Asterisk. I just want to get VM working as soon as possible.

The best sources of information are Asterisk: The Future of Telephony ( asteriskdocs.org/ ), and extensions.conf.sample (source tree).

Each device has a context associated with it. Many devices may share a context. Contexts need not have any devices. The Asterisk dialplan (not the GUI one) contains sections named by the context names. Each context defines a set of Asterisk extension. Typically, for a context that is associated with trusted, internal, devices, some extensions correspond to chargeable calls. An extension can jump to an extension in another context.

Most of the above is irrelevant though, as all that has happened is that the phone has attempted to dial the non-numeric extension “number” “vmail” and it is being interpreted in the same context as normal outgoing calls from that phone, but there is no extension defined for it, and there is no suitable catchall extension to deal with it. “from-internal” is a trusted context, as outlined above.

Thank you David, that makes a bit more sense. So the phone by default is calling an extension titled vmail that is not defined, and for calls that are not defined there is not a catchall? What would be the easiest way to implement the vmail extension so that it properly routes all internal calls placed to vmail to the voicemail system? Thank you again for your time and reply.

I don’t know if it is possible with FreePBX (there will be some way, but it may well require the phone to be configured differently). With pure Asterisk you could do something like:

[from-internal]

exten => vmail,1,VoiceMail(${CALLERID(num)})

in extensions.conf
VoiceMail may be the wrong name and it may have more parameters, as I don’t have the book or a running Asterisk at home.

The application that needs running is actually VoiceMailMain.

So after digging around i found out why the phones could not reach the vmail extension. It turns out that if you are using Aastra phones, they create their own extensions_aastra.conf file and that file was not being included anywhere in the extensions.conf file.

Now it is allowing me to listen to the voicemail, but now some of the phones on the system are able to delete voicemail and some phones cannot delete them. When you hit the delete button on about half of our phones it says failed to delete and nothing happens. When i go in to the spool/asterisk folder i can see the voicemail are there, but i cant understand why some of the phones are able to delete messages and some are not. They are all the exact same model of phone and they should be running the same configuration except for the static ip address. Any ideas?