Why is it called comedian mail

Tagged with: Asterisk , PBX. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You look down at your desk phone when you arrive at the office after a few days away. Softly, you say to yourself:.

I should check my messages — clear them out… How does this all work, again? We all use it - to one degree or another. Much of the voicemail we deal with is on cell phones these days, and there are hundreds of guides and articles covering how they work.

Far less can be found for the various voicemail systems used for business phone systems. This article hopes to help to change that situation for the better, by providing you — good reader — with a solid guide to the Comedian Mail voicemail system.

C omedian is one of the most common voicemail systems out there, being the default voicemail system for several popular phone systems — and yet there is a decided lack of good tutorials or guides for the tool. This guide seeks to help alleviate that lack, and arm you with the information you need to become a confident and productive Comedian Mail user.

RDI Intuitive Technical's customers all use Comedian Mail, so if you are reading this and are one of our customers, dig in! This is the guide for you. For others, the simplest way to check for Comedian is to dial the number to reach your general voicemail system.

The moment you dial this number, if you are using Comedian Mail, you will hear a business-like female voice state, rather succinctly:. Comedian Mail …pause… Mailbox? There are two basic ways you can log in and check your voicemail: Either you press a pre-programmed button on your phone, or you dial the voicemail system shortcut directly. Most phones have a button that is dedicated to accessing voicemail. Most buttons also have an icon on them that show a message envelope as well.

In fact, all the major brands have some kind of icon they use to indicate voicemail — we took the trouble to summarize the most popular of these in Figure 1, below:. B : Cisco Phones………………….. C: Polycom………………………… D : Avaya……………………………. Pressing the voicemail button dials the voicemail feature code to access your voicemail account. At that point, you are ready to log in. Pressing the button on your phone is the same as dialing the special feature code for accessing your personal voicemail.

When you connect to the system in this way, Comedian Mail assumes you want to check the voicemail for the extension you are dialing from. Because of this, it skips a few steps in the general login process and jumps straight to asking you for the password:. If you do not know the password, the only thing you can do is contact your phone administrator and ask them to either tell you the password or ask them to reset it.

It is also possible to log in to Comedian Mail and tell it directly which extension you wish to check voicemail for. When you finish dialing the feature code, you are connected to the voicemail system. In this mode, it actually announces itself and then prompts you to dial the extension you want to check for voicemail:. If you enter an invalid extension, or one that does not have voicemail set up, most systems will not inform you of this.

Some do, but for security reasons most just pretend the extension is valid and proceed to ask you for the password. At this point, if you get the password wrong, some systems will send you back to enter the mailbox again. Others will ask you to enter the passcode again. Just follow the prompts until you get this right — each system is different in the exact process, but they all end up either having you logged in successfully or hanging up on you! Figure 2 below provides a summary for the ways you can log in to voicemail.

The Red Star shows where you start when accessing general voicemail, while the Blue star shows how most of us typically log in — by pressing the voicemail button on our phones. Again, the primary difference is when you log in from your phone it already knows which mailbox you want to access, so the system does not need to ask you.

Once logged in, the system will first provide a quick summary of your voicemail status. This first-time announcement is only done once — and it will inform you of up to three things:. Once the status announcements are done, the system will enumerate your available commands for the Main Menu.

These are summarized in Table 1, below:. Review Messages in Current Folder. The primary thing you will use this menu for is to listen to messages by pressing Option 1. See Section 5: Reviewing Messages , for how best to use its features. Option 2 — Change Folders is also important, but only for those who take advantage of Folders for categorizing and storing messages longer term.

Basic use of the voicemail system rarely calls for using this option except to check old messages once in a while. Compulsive organizers should read Section 6: The Art of Folder Management for inspiration on how much is possible. Option 3 — Advanced Options - is always listed, but many voicemail systems do not have any items in the menu if chosen.

External Validation of Voicemail Passwords. Passwords must be a minimum of six digits in length Passwords must not be strings of repeated digits e. Advanced options for voicemail. Specifies the zonemessages name, as defined in the [zone messages] section, discussed in the next section. To determine the locales that are valid on your Linux system, type locale -a at the shell.

If attach is enabled and messages are stored in different formats, this defines which format is sent with the email notifications. Often wav49 is a good choice, as it uses a better compression algorithm and thus will use less bandwidth. The voicemail box number needs to match the extension number that the call came from, and the voicemail context needs to match the dialplan context.

For example, if you set this to 2 , any message less than 2 minutes in length will not have its length stated. This is considered a very dangerous feature in a phone system mainly because many voicemail users like to use as their password , and is therefore not recommended.

If you insist on allowing this, make sure you have a second level of password in the dialplan where another password is specified. Even so, this is not a safe practice. This is not recommended. The specified context will need to be able to handle dialing of numbers in the format in which they are received for example, the country code may not be received with the caller ID, but might be required for the outgoing call.

By default, the context the caller came from will be used as the exit context. If desired, this setting will define a different context for callers exiting the voicemail system. People get upset if your voicemail system does not allow them to review their messages prior to delivering them. Since this information can also be accessed by pressing 5 , we generally set this to no.

This option is risky, because even though a message was emailed, it is no guarantee that it was received spam filters seem to love to delete Asterisk voicemail messages. Point being: on a new system, leave this at no until you are certain that no messages are being lost due to spam filters.

Volume used to be a problem in older releases of Asterisk, but has not been an issue for many years. The sox utility is required for this to work. If it is, it will force the user to change his voicemail password and record his name. This can be a useful reminder when people return from trips or vacations. Also, pressing previous 4 when at the first message will take the user to the last message.

This is similar to a recycle bin. Setting this to 0 disables this feature. Up to messages can be stored, after which the oldest message will be erased each time another message is deleted. The [zonemessages] Section. The Contexts Section. Note The pipe character used to be more popular in Asterisk. FirstName LastName This is the name of the mailbox owner.

Warning The Asterisk directory cannot handle the concept of a family name that is anything other than a simple word. An Initial voicemail. Note Setting up a Linux server to handle the sending of email is a Linux administration task that is beyond the scope of this book.

Prev Up Next Chapter 8. Voicemail Home Dialplan Integration. For each format listed, Asterisk will create a separate recording in that format whenever a message is left. When an email is sent from Asterisk, this is the email address that it will appear to come from. If an email address is specified for a mailbox, this determines whether the messages is attached to the email if not, a simple message notification is sent. By default Asterisk will only allow a maximum of messages to be stored per user.

This type of setting was useful back in the days when a large voicemail system might have only 40 MB [ c ] of storage: it was necessary to limit the system because it was easy to fill up the hard drive. Many folks will hang up instead of leaving a message when they call somebody and get voicemail.

You can define the maximum greeting length if you want. This setting defines the maximum time for which the caller can remain silent before the recording is stopped. You can fine-tune the silence sensitivity of Asterisk to better define what qualifies as silence.

This little security feature is intended to make brute-force attacks on your mailbox passwords more time-consuming. This setting will move listened-to messages to the Old folder. Setting this to yes will preserve the original urgency setting of any messages the user receives and then forwards on. If you use the users. If you wish to run an external app whenever a message is left, you can define it here.

Any time the password on a mailbox is changed, the script you define here will be notified of the context , mailbox , and new password. The Directory dialplan application uses the voicemail. If you need a character set other than ISO a. Use this option to configure the Feature Descriptor Number. If you do not want emails from your voicemail to have the string [PBX] added to the subject, you can set this to yes. The Asterisk PBX. You can use this setting to configure the From: name that will appear in emails from your PBX.

This option allows users composing messages from their mailboxes to take advantage of the Directory.