SARK V4.0.0 vmail

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Introduction

Voicemail to email uses two different mechanisms depending upon the distro (SME Server or Debian). There are also some restrictions for the SARK500 embedded PBX.

General considerations

Asterisk's voicemail to email implementation is pretty robust and there are no known problems with it (except for a restriction on the S500 - see below). However, you may encounter delivery problems with your own email server. This will usually be due to your server not recognising the incoming mail and treating it as spam. As a result, it may end up in your spam folder or it may not be relayed to its final destination. Asterisk allows you to modify the FROM address on your emails in order to make the mail more acceptable to your mail server. To do this you can modify the asterisk file sark_vmail_layout.conf, which you will find in asterisk->edit

 ;
; This file is provided as part of the SARK/SAIL Asterisk workbench rpm
; It is not a generated file so you may freely change it but it WILL be  
; overwritten if/when you upgrade SARK/SAIL so please make a copy if you
; wish to preserve your changes across an upgrade
;

emailsubject=New message ${VM_MSGNUM} in mailbox ${VM_MAILBOX} from ${VM_CALLERID}

emailbody=${VM_NAME},\n\nThere is a new voicemail in mailbox ${VM_MAILBOX}:\n\n\tFrom:\t${VM_CALLERID}\n\tLength:\t${VM_DUR} seconds\n\tDate:\t${VM_DATE}\n\nWAYS TO ACCESS YOUR VOICEMAILS:\n1- Click on the included attachment (if your PC has audio capability. \n2- Press the Voicemai button on your handset. \n3- Dial *50* from your handset and follow the menu or\n4- Dial *51* from any handset and provide your mailbox number and password (if requested).\n
pbxskip=yes
serveremail=vm@sark
fromstring=SARK PBX Vmail

The last two lines are the ones you can change to influence where the email appears to come from.

serveremail

This setting can be used to identify the source of a voicemail notification message. The value is a string which can be encoded one of two ways. If the string is of the form someone@host.com, then the string will be used as the source address for all voicemail notification emails. If the string is of the form someone, then the host name of the machine running Asterisk will be postpended to the string after insertion of the '@' symbol.

fromstring

This setting allows the adminstrator to override a portion of the From: line in the voicemail notification message. By default, Asterisk sends the string "From: Asterisk PBX <who>. The "Asterisk PBX" portion of the From: line can be overridden by specifying your own string as the value for this setting. One might use this to customize the voicemail notification message and/or remove the reference to "Asterisk PBX".

SME Server

The SME server distro uses qmail and has a full email server on-board, although this is usually not used in SME versions of SARK. In general, it will just work with most implementations although you may have to set serveremail and fromstring (see above) for your set-up.

Debian

The Debian implementations have no mailserver on-board, instead they have a lightweight mail client called ssmtp. ssmtp is pretty easy to set up in most cases, however, it isn't as all-encompassing or as "smart" as qmail on SME server so you have to do a little more work to set it up. The comments above about sending address also hold true for ssmtp. On debian sark releases 4.0.0-80 and higher, you set up your email preferences using the SMTP tab of the Network menu.