Voicemail emails delivered hours too late

[dspaan]

We have a server where the voicemail to email feature is delayed. When callers leave a voicemail message the e-mail with .wav file is delivered hours later. I have ruled out the receiving e-mail box being the cause by testing with different email domains. Does anyone have an idea what might cause this?

[blackbird2306]

Are there any errors or warnings in mail log corresponding to the communication with your email provider? Can you post your mail log only covering the delayed mail with the wav file. It could be a filtering/blacklist/spam problem with you email provider. Just ask them. Does it happen also to mails without attachment file?

[williamconley]

Mai transport is based on postfix configuration if you are using postfix for delivery. But it is also dependent upon your route. If you are going through a system with a very limited bandwidth for email, a WAV file can take an inordinate amount of time to traverse to the destination and some intermediaries will limit the bandwidth on purpose to discourage abuse and reduce the impact on their pass-through systems. Plus, the reputation/configuration of mail permissions for the domains involved in the mail packge make a difference. If you are sending as "bob@emailmonkey.com" and your server's IP does not have explicit permission to send (Google "SPF email") email on behalf of emailmonkey.com, there can be delay or even (or eventually) a rejection based on that lack of permission. If you are going through a major email system such as google, they will often delay everything to see if you are about to spam everyone. You don't spam? they release after ... an hour or so.

You can set postfix to offload the email to a major mail relay (gmail, live, whoever) by using credentials and an actual mail account on that service to dramatically increase their belief that you are not spamming, but that may not remove any bandwidth chokes from ISPs in the way of the transport.

So: What transport are you using? What email path is in use?

[dspaan]

Hi Bill,

I was searching hopelessly for an email log last night but couldn't find anything. We use the vicibox 8 default transport, i don't know if this is sendmail or postfix? How can i check this? I also read in the forums that this is basic asterisk functionality so i searched for that too and all i could find is that by default Asterisk uses sendmail and there should be a /var/log/maillog but it doesn't exist.

I also checked the spam score with https://www.mail-tester.com/ last time there was an issue and changed some things and the score was 7/10. I just tested now again and the testing service is not receiving the e-mail (yet).

On this server we did change /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf to this:

Code: Select all

[general]
serveremail=no-reply@hostname.serverdomain.nl
emailbody=${VM_DATE},\n\nVoicemail voor ${VM_NAME}:\n\nTelefoonnummer: +${VM_CIDNUM}
fromstring=Serverdomain Voicemail
emailsubject=Nieuwe voicemail van: +${VM_CIDNUM}

Where it says hostname.serverdomain we have set the acual URL that this server resolves to.

We also changed:

/etc/postfix/main.cf

Code: Select all

mydomain=serverdomain.nl
myhostname = hostname.serverdomain.nl

[dspaan]

Postback: After some help from Blackbird it turns out the voicemail zone for the voicemail box was set to a wrong country as well as the system settings voicemail zone. This caused a wrong time to be displayed in the received e-mail. So the e-mails were not delivered too late at all, the stamp was just wrong.

[williamconley]

Great postback dennis