Question : Issues with Asterisk FollowMe & Network Voicemail

Hello,

I'm having a little problem with my Followme setup and our staff members network voicemail. At the moment, we have the followme of each extension setup to ring them at their SIP/Softphone first, then onto their mobile phone and finally to their internal voicemail.

The routing and logic behind it works absolutely fine but the problem arises if no action is taken with the cell phone stage - i.e. if no one answers and Asterisk's call is forced to goto network voicemail.

Asterisk stays on the line and ends up leaving a voicemail message on the mobile phone - which, if you miss a couple of calls, results in a huge number of voicemail messages on the phone with no content.

Does anyone know if there is anyway of detecting whether or not it is voicemail that has answered and ensuring that these messages are not left? We've tried reducing the timeout time, but we've come into the problem that staff dont have enough time to accept the call.

Any tips or hints would be appreciated. I've posted the code that we are using to make calls below.

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             [macro-extensions]
exten => 801,1,Macro(stdext,801)
exten => 821,1,Dial(SIP/trunk/1234)
exten => 811,1,Dial(SIP/801)
exten => 831,1,Dial(SIP/trunk/5678)
 
[macro-stdext]
;;;; STANDARD EXTENSION HANDLING)
exten => s,3,Wait(1)
exten => s,4,Set(CALLFILENAME=${ARG1}-${STRFTIME(,,NaVM)})
exten => s,5,Monitor(wav,,m)
exten => s,6,PlayBack(transfer-extension)
exten => s,7,Followme(${ARG1})
exten => s,8,Wait(2)
exten => s,9,Goto(17);VM
exten => s,17,Voicemail(${ARG1}@default,su)
exten => s,18,Hangup                                   	
exten => _s,107,Goto(17)
 
 
 
followme.conf:
 
[801]
followme-pls-hold-prompt=>silence/1
context=>extensions
number=>811,30
number=>821,30

           
         

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Answer : Issues with Asterisk FollowMe & Network Voicemail

Normally this shouldn't be an issue with SIP trunks. I've only run into that issue with analog phone lines as they have no way of detecting (in asterisk) when a call is answered by the far-side. You possibly can limit the number of false voicemail messages left on the cell phones by either extending the ring time on the cell phones or shortening the amount of time the follow-me app waits before returning to the next context in your asterisk dialplan.