The ability to store voice messages in the same location as regular email is something that the telecom industry has been promising for a long time. They called it Unified Messaging, and while most PBXes now offer some sort of unified messaging, it is typ- ically very expensive to license and implement. Naturally, Asterisk cuts through all the silliness and just allows you to have your voi- cemailbox integrated into an IMAP environment. There are several advantages to storing your voicemail on an IMAP server. When you listen to a voicemail on your phone, the message is set to the read state on the IMAP server. This means that your |
email client will also note that it has been read. By the same token, if you listen to the message from your email client, the voicemail will turn off the message notification light on any phones that are assigned to that mailbox. Deleting a message from one place will cause it to be deleted from every place. So once deleted, the message is truly gone. This is Unified Messaging, the holy grail of voicemail to email integration, but Asterisk humbly decides not to make a big deal of it. IMAP integration is still new functionality, so there are a few things that need to be added in order to get it to function. First off, Asterisk needs to have an IMAP client installed so that it can communicate with the IMAP server. Pretty much any IMAP server works (even Exchange Server), and the authors have personally tested IMAP voicemail support with both the Courier-IMAP and Dovecot IMAP servers. The IMAP server may be on the same physical machine as the Asterisk installation, or it may be on the other side of the globe. To be able to access the IMAP server, Asterisk requires an IMAP client library. This library is the University of Washington’s free IMAP client, named c-client. To install the c-client you simply need to navigate to your /usr/src di- |
rectory and run the following commands: |
# wget ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/imap.tar.Z |