How to set up voicemail-to-email in VICIdial

Dialing into a voicemail box to check messages works, but it's a chore — you have to remember the ID, punch in the password, and listen in order. For most teams it's faster to have new messages land straight in an inbox. VICIdial does this with a single optional field on the voicemail box: Email.

Fill it in and each new message gets sent to that address. Leave it blank and nothing is emailed — the messages just sit on the box waiting for someone to dial in. So turning the feature on is genuinely as simple as typing an address into one box.

What the email field does

The Email setting tells the box where to deliver messages. When a caller leaves a message and the box has an address set, VICIdial hands it off to the server's mail system, which emails it out. The catch is in that handoff: your server has to actually be set up to send mail. If outbound email isn't configured on the box, filling this field in won't magically make mail appear — it relies on the underlying mail transport being in place.

Once mail is working, the email typically arrives with the recording attached as an audio file and the message details — box name, time, caller info VICIdial captured — in the body. You play the attachment from your mail client and never touch the dial-in menu.

Turning it on

You set the email on the modify-voicemail screen. The add form has an Email field too, but most people add the box first and tune it afterward. Either way the steps are the same:

1. Open the box from the Show Voicemail Entries list and click MODIFY.
2. Type the destination address into the Email field.
3. Save the record.
4. Leave a test message and confirm it lands in the inbox.

If you've never opened the longer screen before, our walkthrough of how to modify a voicemail box shows where every field lives.

flowchart TD
  A["Caller leaves message"] --> B{"Email field set?"}
  B -->|No| C["Message stays on box"]
  C --> D["Dial in to check it"]
  B -->|Yes| E["Server mail configured?"]
  E -->|No| C
  E -->|Yes| F["Recording emailed to inbox"]
  F --> G["Play attachment in mail client"]

Why it's worth doing

Email delivery turns voicemail into something your team can search, forward, and respond to like any other message. A box behind a DID (direct inward dialing) (the inbound number a carrier routes calls to) or a Call menu can quietly collect after-hours messages and drop them in a shared inbox, so the first person in next morning already has the queue. It also pairs well with an Ingroup overflow setup, where missed calls become emails instead of lost callbacks.

One decision to make alongside the email field is whether the message should also stay on the box. By default it does — you get the email and the box keeps a copy. If you'd rather the box clear itself once mail goes out, that's the delete-after-email setting. The two work together, so it's worth setting both at once.

For the full context of how greetings, prompts, and delivery tie together, our audio prompts and voicemail guide covers it end to end, including the TTS (text to speech) route for generating greetings without recording your own.

Voicemail-to-email is one field and a working mail setup away. If you'd like a VICIdial server that's ready to configure out of the gate, we provision a dedicated, secured box in under 40 seconds — see pricing and start routing messages to your inbox the same day.