New vs old messages in VICIdial voicemail

Open the voicemail list in the admin screen and each box shows a message count. Look closer and there are actually two numbers behind it: New Messages and Old Messages. They are not a single tally — they are separate folders, and a message lives in exactly one of them at a time.

The rule is simple. A message that nobody has listened to yet is new. The moment you play it through the phone menu, it moves to old (the saved folder). Both counts are read live from the Asterisk server, so they reflect what is physically sitting on disk for that box, not a stale database guess. That matters when you are reconciling what the admin screen reports against what is actually on the box, because there is no separate database tally that can drift out of sync.

Where the counts show up

You see the new and old numbers in two places. The voicemail list gives you the per-box message count at a glance. If you turn on the summary display for a box, the admin home page shows the box name, the new count, the old count, and the total together — a quick triage view for whoever logs in first. That summary table only appears once at least one box has the option set to Y, which is covered in the show VM on summary screen setting.

This split matters for any box that acts as a message drop from a DID (direct inward dialing) or a Call menu. New is your work queue; old is your archive. When the new count drifts upward and nobody clears it, callers who left contact info during an after-hours IVR (interactive voice response) menu are going unanswered. Treat the new number the way you would treat an unread inbox: zero is the goal at the end of every shift, and anything that lingers is a follow-up you owe someone.

How a message changes folders

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> New: Caller leaves message
  New --> Old: Agent listens via phone
  Old --> Old: Saved for reference
  New --> [*]: Deleted while new
  Old --> [*]: Deleted after review
  Old --> Emailed: Sent out
  Emailed --> [*]: Removed if delete-after-email

A few behaviors fall out of this state model that catch people off guard:

• Listening is what ages a message, not time. A two-week-old message you never opened is still new.
• Deleting a message drops it out of whichever folder it was in — it does not move from new to old on the way out.
• If you have delete-after-email turned on, a message can be emailed and removed before anyone ever sees it in the old folder.

Keeping the new count honest

Because the counts come straight off the Asterisk filesystem, the cleanest way to manage them is through the phone menu — see how to check voicemail by phone for the dial-in flow that does the moving and deleting. If you would rather not dial in at all, point the box at an inbox; messages still age, but you read them where you already work. For the full map of how voicemail sits beside Call recording, Music on hold, and TTS (text to speech) prompts, the audio prompts and voicemail guide lays out the whole audio side of the dialer.

None of this counting works unless the underlying box is healthy and the storage is reachable. If you would rather start from a server where voicemail, audio, and the audio store are already wired and running, you can have one live in under 40 seconds — see pricing.