VoiceMail with rotary phones -- impossible?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Is there any way to configure VoiceMailMain to work without a pound or star key? We are using old rotary phones with ATAs (grandstream HT801) and they don’t seem to have the ability to send # or * from rotary phones (please correct me if wrong). (We’re not interested to get additional pulse-to-DTMF hardware.)

I found the listen-control-* options, which allow changing the keys for listening back to messages, but the interface for configuring your mailbox requires use of the # and * keys, and there don’t seem to be options to change that.

Thanks for any advice!

1 Like
2

Why are you trying? If you are using loop disconnect phones for a historic feel, voicemail with loop disconnect control would be an anachronism.

Voicemail was one of the things enabled by DTMF. If any legacy LD support was provided, by some operators, it would have been by counting the audio clicks, not by proper LD signalling, but the normal solution would have been DTMF tone encoder boxes.

Some countries used timed break recall, which is a hook flash that cannot be distinguished from an LD 1 digit, so LD dialling across the PSTN would never have worked reliably for IVR type services.

3

Thanks – it’s a bit of an odd situation, where we want the rotary phones to have access to this feature, so I take your point.

Investigating the code, I see that I could modify app_voicemail.c as needed if I really wanted to enable this, but besides considerable code efforts it would also require re-recording all the voicemail prompts, so sounds like it isn’t feasible, at least for now. At least the system is basically usable (e.g. password can be set) for rotary phone users, even if they can’t access a lot of the options.

4

Have you considered the Mini-Voicemail subsystem ? Not part of regular Voicemail via app_voicemail, but a powerful suite of dialplan applications and functions that allow greater customization. The MINIVMACCOUNT function is one good place to start reading (and contains links to documentation about other parts of the system.)

5

Didn’t know about it – I’ll check it out, thanks!