How to add a VICIdial voicemail box

Every phone you create in VICIdial already gets its own voicemail box automatically. So when people ask how to "add a voicemail box," they almost always mean a general box: a standalone mailbox that isn't tied to any one agent's phone. You'd want one when a call needs somewhere to land that has nothing to do with a specific extension.

The good news is that creating one is short. The add screen asks for five things, you fill them in, you save, and the box exists. Let's go through it.

When you actually want a general box

The most common reason is a message drop for inbound calls. If you have a DID (direct inward dialing) (the direct inbound number carriers route calls to) or a Call menu (the press-1-for-sales style menu callers hear) and nobody picks up, the call needs somewhere to go. A general voicemail box is that somewhere. The caller leaves contact info and you follow up later.

The other reason is the agent-unavailable case. If your queue is empty or everyone is busy, you might rather collect a callback than drop the call. Pointing that overflow at a general box gives the customer a place to talk. Both of these patterns are covered in more depth in our guide to audio prompts and voicemail, which ties the box into the wider prompt and greeting picture.

The ADD A NEW VOICEMAIL ENTRY screen

You reach it from the ADD A NEW VOICEMAIL ENTRY link on the left menu of the admin pages. Like most add-new forms in VICIdial, it's deliberately short. It only shows the handful of fields needed for a valid record, and it holds back the rest until you save. That keeps the form from being a wall of options you don't need yet.

Here are the five fields you'll fill in:

• Voicemail ID — the numbers-only identifier for the box. Minimum two characters, no spaces or punctuation, and it can't clash with an existing voicemail ID or any phone's ID on the system.
• Password — used to dial in and check messages later. Two to ten characters.
• Name — a label for the box, two to one hundred characters, so you can tell boxes apart in the list.
• Email — optional. If your server can send mail, messages get delivered here. Leave it blank and nothing is emailed.
• Active — whether the box accepts and gives access to messages at all.

The one thing that trips people up: if you don't set both the ID and the password, the form will refuse to save. They aren't really optional even though the screen looks forgiving.

What happens after you save

Once you submit, the box appears in the Voicemail list with its number, name, active status, message count, delete flag, and admin group. From the list you can click MODIFY to open the longer screen, which exposes everything the short add form hid — greeting, time zone, options, and the message counters. So the workflow is always: add the basics, save, then modify for the rest.

flowchart TD
  A["Open ADD A NEW VOICEMAIL ENTRY"] --> B["Enter ID and Password"]
  B --> C["Enter Name"]
  C --> D{"Set Email?"}
  D -->|Yes| E["Messages email out"]
  D -->|No| F["Messages stay on box"]
  E --> G["Submit"]
  F --> G["Submit"]
  G --> H["Box appears in list"]
  H --> I["Click MODIFY for full options"]

From there you can wire the box into a call path. A general box can sit behind an IVR (interactive voice response) tree, catch overflow from an Ingroup (the inbound queue agents pull calls from), or simply be the destination a DID points to after hours. Once it's saved, the next step is usually to open the longer modify screen and tune the rest.

Adding a box takes about a minute once you know the rules. Standing up the whole VICIdial server it lives on can be just as quick — we provision a dedicated, secured box in under 40 seconds, so you can see pricing and have somewhere to add that first voicemail box today.