The VICIdial "delete vmail after email" setting

Once you've set a voicemail box to email its messages out, a question follows: should the message also stay on the box? VICIdial answers it with one optional flag — Delete Voicemail After Email. Set it and the message is removed from the box the moment it's emailed. Leave it and the box keeps a copy alongside the email.

The default is N, meaning the box keeps everything. That's the safe choice, but it's not always the right one. The setting is really about where your messages live and how long they pile up.

What the flag actually does

Delete Voicemail After Email only does anything when the box also has an email address set. With both in place, the flow is: caller leaves a message, the recording emails out, and then — if the flag is Y — the message is deleted off the box. The email is your only copy from that point on. If the flag is N, the same email goes out but the message also stays on the Asterisk server, counting toward the box's new and old message totals.

If you haven't wired up email delivery yet, this flag has nothing to act on. Our walkthrough of setting up voicemail-to-email covers that half first; this setting is the natural follow-up.

The retention trade-off

This is the heart of the decision. Keeping messages on the box gives you a second copy and a dial-in fallback, but those recordings accumulate on the server's disk and the box's counters keep climbing. Deleting after email keeps the box tidy and the disk lean, at the cost of having no on-box copy — if the email is lost, so is the message.

• Leave it N when you want a fallback copy, when a team checks messages by phone as well as by email, or when something downstream re-reads the box.
• Set it Y when email is the only place you ever read messages, when disk space is tight, or when a high-traffic message-drop box would otherwise fill up fast.

A busy box behind a DID (direct inward dialing) or Call menu is the classic case for Y — it can take dozens of messages a day, and if every one stays on the box forever the counters and disk usage grow without end. A low-volume box where a supervisor occasionally dials in is the classic case for N.

flowchart TD
  A["Caller leaves message"] --> B["Recording emailed out"]
  B --> C{"Delete after email = Y?"}
  C -->|Yes| D["Message removed from box"]
  D --> E["Email is the only copy"]
  C -->|No| F["Message kept on box"]
  F --> G["Counts toward new / old totals"]
  G --> H["Still checkable by phone"]

Where you set it

The flag lives on the modify-voicemail screen, not the short add form — it's one of the options that only appears after the box is saved. Open the box from the Show Voicemail Entries list, click MODIFY, find Delete Voicemail After Email, and flip it to Y or N. If you want a tour of every field on that screen first, see how to modify a voicemail box.

It's worth thinking about this alongside your wider Call recording retention, since voicemail and recordings both eat disk over time. The same audio store your greetings and TTS (text to speech) prompts come from shares that space, so a tidy retention policy across both keeps the server healthy. Our audio prompts and voicemail guide puts the storage picture in context.

One small flag, one clear trade-off: a fallback copy versus a tidy box. If you want a VICIdial server where you can set this kind of policy from day one, we provision a dedicated, secured box in under 40 seconds — see pricing and tune your retention exactly how you like it.