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Special Mailboxes / Special Lines / Voicemail

Posted by netriplex on Tue, 04/15/2014

We have been evaluating Thirdlane MTE and we are a bit confused over how special mailboxes appear to be configured in the system and we see no way whatsoever to ever use special lines.

First, the special mailbox issue...

If we try to setup a very basic organization (many of our customers are like this which is why we have always done everything manually up to this point) with 5 extensions in it with a single DID that rings all via a hunt list.

Next, we create a special mailbox "3333" and assign a PIN and name the owner "SharedMailbox". In this situation/organization, we do not want any individual extensions to have their own voicemail. Everyone should use this 3333 shared mailbox. We go in to each extensions settings and select this voicemail box on the voicemail tab and everything seems ok. However, when we return to special mailboxes, the 3333 is gone and instead 5 new "special mailboxes" are created that correspond to the user extensions. In the user extension settings, the voicemail retrieval extension is set to the user extension and technically everything works, I just don't understand why these additional mailboxes are created. If you hit *98 from a phone and use the password for the extension listed in special mailboxes, it makes it evident that an actual mailbox is created for the extension with no messages in it. Did I configure something wrong or is this just something that is required by asterisk to navigate the various contexts? I guess I don't understand why the voicemail retrieval extension could not be simply set to 3333 on all of the phones and bypass the need for these special mailboxes.

Second, the Special Lines situation...

From exploring all the PBX feature options of the thirdlane product, it appears that the ONLY place a special line can be used is in a queue. However, this differs from some searching we have done on the forums where we found some pretty old threads that indicate that they can be used in hunt lists, etc. The plan was to use the special lines for ATA devices if we decided on the Thirdlane product as they require none of the features of "user extensions" and based on forum posts that is what their intent was to be for. Is this a bug for them to not be available in simple hunt lists or did Thirdlane change the theory on Special Lines?

Lastly, Voicemail,

Old forum posts seem to indicate that there was/is a way to listen to voicemail in the portal. I am unsure if it is because of the "Shared" manner that we have the only voicemail box configured in our test case or if it have been removed, but I see no way to do this.

Any insight / help on the above topics would be greatly appreciated.