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Voice Mail Delay?

Posted by CPY on Thu, 03/31/2011

Hello. I have a customer who has reported (multiple times) that whenever someone leaves a voice mail for her, she does not actually receive the voice mail until later, sometimes hours later, other times as much as 2 weeks later. She also reports that when this happens, she cannot delete the voice mail from her inbox.

For reference, her extension is set to attach voice mails to an email, but not to delete them from the inbox upon email delivery. As far as I know, this is our only customer experiencing this issue, but it does continue to happen.

Any ideas?

Thanks.


Submitted by fuse3 on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

I am having the same issue. Customer says she can check her voicemail at the end of the day (5:00PM) and get "you have no messages". Then the next morning check her voice and have 3 messages all from ealier in the prior day (prior to checking at the end of the day).

Any ideas?

Submitted by CPY on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

Fuse, Ive not made any progress on this. It has been really odd and really sporadic. What I see now is that a client will be notified late of the voice mail they received. Then the client will listen to it, and delete it from their voice mail box. When they do this, however, their indicator light gets stuck on as if there is a message in the box, however there is not. When they go back into their voice mail box to try and delete it again, it says there is a message there, but when they try to listen to it, it just skips over it completely, and takes them to some other option inside the voice mail box.

Ive tried a number of things, all with no luck, ranging from deleting the voice mail myself from the var/spool/asterisk/voice mail section. Ive tried deleting and recreating their extension. Ive tried factory resetting the phones themselves.

Ive noticed in on 5 customers, or rather, 5 customers have noticed it. On 4 of them, their voice mail box is set to send them a copy of the voice mail via email, but not to delete the voice mail from the box. I wonder if this setting has anything to do with it, though, I am not sure why it would.

The other interesting thing is that other extension within one tenant do not seem to experience the same issues, even if the voice mail box options are set the same. Its a bit baffling as to why it affects a few customer and not all of them.

Submitted by eeman on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

no, I was referring to CPY's references to his indexing bug thats been documented.

fuse3 your problem could be timestamp related. Are the messages being left with times in the future? Check both the file date/time and the contents of the evenlope (.txt file)

Submitted by CPY on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

@ Eeman: Which version is that? Unfortunately, I am only the tier 1 guy, and as thus, get to make no decisions around here, but get to talk to all the clients ;)

Its fun, really.

EDIT

We are currently on Asterisk 1.6.2.17.3

Submitted by eeman on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

1.4.30something
1.6.2.17
1.8.3

some change was rolled to all 3 that causes an indexing problem... you have to upgrade versions (or downgrade) and then you have to delete the mailbox messages that are indexed incorrectly.

Submitted by CPY on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

Welp, that explains it. I do appreciate your help eeman. Now I shall relay the info to the higher ups and see if they wish to act on it. If not, Ill let them start answering the calls from the clients ;)

Submitted by CPY on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

Umm, I can probably find when it was dispatched, though I may need to have someone else look at it, as I am not sure I have the access for that. Where would I find the maillog? I assume there is a maillog in asterisk somewhere or something, and that you are not referring to the mail log on the actual mail server that sends the emails?

Submitted by eeman on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

the changelog is the best place to find out what bugs a specific version fixed from the previous version. If you look at .18 when it was in the release candidate state you'd have seen references to the problem and the bug tracker number (which you can pull up in mantis for further clarification). Thats the best information to pass along to your bosses. It lets them know the details of a particular bug, and sometimes when the bug entered into the code, and when it was fixed. Picking a version of asterisk in the 1.6 family is a bit like picking a version with bugs you're willing to live with. there has yet to be even a remotely perfect version.

Submitted by eeman on Tue, 05/10/2011 Permalink

every mail server has a maillog. asterisk delivers mail to the local mail server who then delivers it to the recipient mail server. In redhat/centos systems thats /var/log/maillog

Submitted by CPY on Thu, 05/12/2011 Permalink

I see another issue now, that seems it could be related. Some clients now get a new voice mail, and are alerted of the voice mail, but then cannot listen to it. They go into the mail box, type in pin, hit '1' to listen to new messages, and then it doesnt play it. It starts to play it, by saying 'first new,' how it usually begins, but then instead of going on to '[first new] message....' it goes to '[first new] press option 3 for....'

Its very odd. Wondering if you think this could be related to the same issue as above.

Submitted by fuse3 on Thu, 05/12/2011 Permalink

Appears i was able to resolve my issue by doing the following in voicemail.conf

[general]
pollmailboxes=yes

[zonemessages]
;eastern = America/New_York|'vm-received' Q 'digits/at' IMp
;central = America/Chicago|'vm-received' Q 'digits/at' IMp
;mountain = America/Denver|'vm-received' Q 'digits/at' IMp
pacific = America/Los_Angeles|'vm-received' Q 'digits/at' IMp
;central24 = America/Chicago|'vm-received' q 'digits/at' H N 'hours'
;military = Zulu|'vm-received' q 'digits/at' H N 'hours' 'phonetic/z_p'

Submitted by CPY on Thu, 05/12/2011 Permalink

Guys,

I appreciate your help. Unfortunately, my admins are reluctant to make the global changes suggested because it is not affecting every customer, thus they do not think its a global issue.

But, again, wanted to say I really do appreciate the help from you two.