System information

Option Value/Example Notes
won’t appreciate it if you cut her off after three minutes. A setting
somewhere between 600 seconds (10 minutes) and 3600 seconds
(1 hour) will probably be about right.
minsecs 4 Many folks will hang up instead of leaving a message when they call
somebody and get voicemail. Sometimes this hangup happens after
recording has started, so the mailbox owner gets an annoying two-
second message of somebody hanging up. This setting ensures that
Asterisk will ignore messages that are shorter than the configured
minimum length. You should take care not to set this to a value that
is too high, though, because then a message like “Hey it’s me give
me a call” (which can be said in less than one second) will get lost,
and you’ll get complaints of messages disappearing. Three seconds
seems to be about right. To discourage people from leaving ultra-
short messages that might be discarded, you can request callers to
identify themselves and leave some information about why they
called.
maxgreet 1800 You can define the maximum greeting length if you want. Again,
since storage is not a problem and setting this too low will annoy
your more verbose users, we suggest setting this to a high value and
letting your users figure it out an appropriate length for themselves.
skipms 3000 When listening to messages, users can skip ahead or backwards by
pressing (by default) * and #. This setting indicates the length of
the jump (in milliseconds).
maxsilence 5 This setting defines the maximum time for which the caller can
remain silent before the recording is stopped. We like to set this
setting to one second longer than minsecs (if you set it equal to
or less than minsecs, you will get a warning).
silencethreshold 128 You can fine-tune the silence sensitivity of Asterisk to better define
what qualifies as silence. In practice, this is seldom a good idea, since
you cannot control the volumes of all the calls you’ll be getting from
different places. It’s best to leave this at the default.
maxlogins 3 This little security feature is intended to make brute-force attacks
on your mailbox passwords more time-consuming. If a bad password
is received this many times, voicemail will hang up and you’ll have
to call back in to try again. Note that this will not lock up the mailbox.
Patient snoopers can continue to try to log into your mailbox as many
times as they like, they’ll just have to call back every third attempt.
If you have a lot of ham-fingered users, you can set this to something
like 5.
moveheard yes This setting will move listened-to messages to the Old folder. We
recommend leaving this at the default.
forward_urgent_auto no Setting this to yes will preserve the original urgency setting of any
messages the user receives and then forwards on. If you leave it at
no, users can set the urgency level themselves on messages that
they forward.
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