Voicemail email configuration

[paul1975]

Hi

I'm having trouble configure voicemail to send emails.

I have Asterisk 1.6 running on a Synology ds108j. I've installed nail to be able to send emails under my gmail credentials.

Basically, I can get Asterisk to send an email, but with the following observations:

1. Only wav49 format works. If I set format=wav, I get errors such as 'Can't find format wav'
2. I don't seem able to override the default 'messagebody'. The email that is sent always comes through with some default message "Just wanted to let you know you were just left a 0:04 long message ..."
3. The 'wav' attachment isn't coming through as an attachment, but instead arrives as some 'MIME mulitpart' nonsense:

------voicemail_1200025152611019739
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Dear CiscoFon:

Just wanted to let you know you were just left a 0:04 long message (number 1)
in mailbox 2000 from xxx, on Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 07:29:20 AM so you might
want to check it when you get a chance. Thanks!

--Asterisk

------voicemail_1200025152611019739
Content-Type: audio/x-WAV; name="msg0000.WAV"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Description: Voicemail sound attachment.
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="msg0000.WAV"

UklGRt0aAABXQVZFZm10IBQAAAAxAAEAQB8AAFkGAABBAAAAAgBAAWZhY3QEAAAAQIMAAGRh
dGGpGgAAHindnYQiYNs0cuPYC2Acx3HbRiSAG7mN20QHYNRGjhv3kbNhTi0ENpYix5UrALhx
48qRXwS4TRzJkekGNpKjNm4eKdfVZAxgI8lS5CYjYCJJjh0JS4DbOG4UxwyAmzZt3Padc2Gt
MgLYkRw3cr4CNrIcR5LkAlhuIjeOuAI6ciNXjp8p19EULmDjRq5ciy1gnThyY9tEgCNHkht1
JWDkyLIk65VSHU3wBNiR27hxwQK0cZpIkuMAxo0cR3LABlaS5Thy3zjjlQILgOO2beQGTYAb
OU4bmURAGymSHEkkgCS5kdzqjXLdDXYESJbaOJIxAraNJEeO3QS2beRKcnMCJpLcyG3eGdfV
xAOA5LaR5QgGYCRHjhyZS4Act2ncVi9gY7mRXOeNMR2NPATKkeVYjncCtnWjuGnWBraR48iR
9QC0kmTJll4Z182Ga4BkR5Lk5g5g4zhtGzlPYNvGUSSJJIAkSY7l6JkR3UlmACZOI8eNtAKo
jdy2beAAOHIjx5FsAMayZEeOHhnZ0UYHQBu3beSmLmAjuW0bxy6ApEht24YjYCNHduPoiZPh
TFACNo4luW3EAkaS3EZy1wTIjeW2cqwENnJdx5GeGZ+ZIAtg5UiSJJksgCM7kuWmImDkyG3c
Vk9gJElu2+aVsRkprQQ2cuRIbkACto0jJW4xAqZtG0mOVwTGcSvJkZ4o09mkZoAlR47kaCyA
27ZxIwktYONYkiNlS6AcyW1kiY6zIUo6BDhO4yZp7wK4aa24krwASIosuXLcAMrSIseKaIlZ
etc.etc.

My voicemail.conf file is along the lines of:

[general]
format=wav49
attach=yes
messagebody=Test
...

Any assistance will be much appreciated, I've been battling with this for hours!

Thanks
Paul

[david55]

3. The 'wav' attachment isn't coming through as an attachment, but instead arrives as some 'MIME mulitpart' nonsense:

That's how attachments have been handled in internet mail for more than the last decade. Before that, the methods were more ad hoc and required heuristics in the mail client.

[paul1975]

MIME might be the proctcol used to deliver the message, but you would not expect an email client to present the 'raw' MIME code to you as text content.

I think the issue is something to do with using "nail" as the mailcmd instead of "sendmail". With sendmail you can do "cat <attachment-stream> | sendmail -t target_address. But with nail, you have to do "nail -a <attachment path>". So the question becomes, how can I override the way Asterisk uses the 'mailcmd'? I could just write a shell script to do this, and set the mailcmd as the path to this script, but surely there is a more elegant way to do this by editing the Asterisk configuration.

[david55]

No. The defacto standards for program submission of mail is the sendmail one, which is why alternative MTAs will emulate sendmail for submission purposes. They question is why are you using a non-conforming mail program, possibly one intended only for human use?

The submission to sendmail will include the top level headers, not just the ones for the individual parts.

[david55]

nail appears to be based on mailx. A CentOS build of mailx users /usr/sbin/sendmail to actually submit the email. You should not be using mailx to submit mail from a program.

[root@centos code]# strings /bin/mailx | grep sendmail
[-- sendmail-options ...]
/usr/sbin/sendmail

[paul1975]

David, thanks for your response. I've ended up using msmtp, as it looks like sendmail is difficult to configure without a static IP address. msmtp works well.

[dejanst]

One good option would also be using SSMTP instead of sendmail. SSMTP is also very simple to set up.