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Voicemail Greetings

Every mailbox keeps a library of named greetings and chooses which one plays in each voicemail situation. Users manage their own library from Thirdlane Connect or the User Portal; as an administrator you can open any mailbox’s library from the User Extensions grid, and deploy one recording to many mailboxes at once.

This is separate from Greetings (voice prompts), which are the shared announcements played by menus and routes. Voicemail greetings belong to an individual mailbox.

Opening a user’s greeting library

In User Extensions, the Greetings column opens the greeting library for that user’s mailbox. You see and edit exactly what the user sees: the same library, the same per-situation selectors, the same upload / text-to-speech / record-by-phone options. Changes take effect immediately.

This is the quickest way to help a user who has left an out-of-office greeting running, or to put a greeting in place for someone who has not set one up yet.

Deploying a greeting to many mailboxes

Select Deploy Greeting to Mailboxes from the User Extensions grid menu to push one recording into many libraries at once - a holiday message, a message about an office move, or a baseline greeting for a group of new hires.

Name. The name the greeting gets in every mailbox library. An existing greeting with the same name is replaced rather than duplicated, so re-running a deployment to fix a typo is safe.

Description. Free-form notes stored with each copy.

Extensions. Comma-separated extensions. Leave it empty to deploy to every mailbox in the organization.

Activate For. Optionally make the deployed greeting the active one for a situation in every target mailbox. Leave it unset to stock the libraries without changing what callers hear - useful when you want a greeting ready in advance and switched on later.

The audio comes from the same three sources as any other greeting: upload a file, generate it with text-to-speech, or record it by phone. It is produced once and copied per mailbox, so each user owns an independent copy they can edit or replace afterwards.

The result reports how many mailboxes were updated and how many failed. A mailbox that fails - most often an extension with no voicemail box - does not stop the rest of the deployment.

Migrations

Voicemail greetings imported during a migration land in the mailbox library and are then activated, so a migrated greeting behaves exactly like one the user recorded themselves: visible in Connect and the portal, and switchable without re-uploading. See Data Migration and Import.

REST API

Greeting libraries are fully scriptable. POST /api/tenants/{tenant}/greetings/deploy is the bulk endpoint used by the deploy screen:

Terminal window
curl "https://pbx.example.com/api/tenants/acme/greetings/deploy" \
  -X POST -H "X-API-Key: $TL_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data-binary '{
    "name": "Company holiday message",
    "text": "Our offices are closed for the holidays and reopen on January second.",
    "extensions": ["2001", "2002"],
    "activate": true,
    "type": "unavail"
  }'

"activate_type": "unavail" is accepted as shorthand for the activate and type pair, so the same field the per-mailbox endpoints use also works here.

Per-mailbox endpoints under /api/tenants/{tenant}/extensions/{ext}/greeting-library and /greeting-active cover listing, creating, updating, deleting, and activating individual greetings. Activation requires a library_id: send it as null, or use DELETE, to return a type to the system default. Users have the same operations against their own mailbox under /api/user/voicemail/. Full request and response schemas are in the Voicemail Greetings API reference.

Best practices

  • Deploy without activating when a message is for a date in the future. Stock the libraries now, then activate on the day - either per mailbox or with a second deploy that only sets the active type.
  • Reuse the same name for a recurring announcement (for example Company holiday message). Re-deploying replaces the existing copy in each library instead of leaving users with a pile of near-duplicates.
  • Prefer Temporary for organization-wide absences such as a shutdown week. It overrides each user’s own greetings while set and leaves them intact, so restoring normal service is one change.
  • Let users own their day-to-day greetings. Bulk deploy is for messages that genuinely apply to everyone; individual greetings are better managed by the person whose voice callers expect.