Show voicemail on the VICIdial summary screen

Most VICIdial voicemail boxes are check-on-demand: somebody dials in, punches a password, and listens. That works until a box quietly fills up with callbacks nobody is watching. VICIdial has a small setting that fixes the watching part — Show VM on Summary Screen — and it puts a box's message counts on the admin summary page the moment you log in.

It is off by default. Flip it to Y on the boxes that matter and they show up in a compact table on the landing page of the administration interface, so you see the backlog before you go looking for it.

What the summary table shows

When at least one box has this set to Y, VICIdial draws a small table on the summary page that appears right after you sign into the admin screen. For each box you've flagged, it lists four things.

• The box name (the friendly name on the voicemail record, not the numeric mailbox).
• New message count — messages left but not yet listened to.
• Old message count — messages already played at least once.
• Total messages currently in the box.

One quirk worth knowing: the table does not appear at all unless you've set at least one mailbox to Y. So if you flip the switch and see nothing, check that the page is reading the box you expect, and that the box is the Voicemail drop target you think it is. The counts come straight from the dialer's Ingroup and DID (direct inward dialing) handling, so they reflect what is actually sitting on disk, not a cached number.

Why you'd watch it

The setting earns its place on boxes that take real callbacks. If a DID (direct inward dialing) routes after-hours calls to voicemail, or a Call menu sends overflow to a box during a queue spike, that box becomes a quiet to-do list. Without the summary table, the only way to know it filled up is for someone to dial in and check. With it on, the count is the first thing you see, every shift.

It pairs well with email delivery — if you also forward messages out, the summary count is your at-a-glance sanity check that nothing is stuck. The mechanics of how the counts get to the summary page look like this.

How the count reaches the screen

flowchart TD
  A["Caller leaves message"] --> B["Stored on Asterisk box"]
  B --> C["New count goes up"]
  D["Show VM on Summary = Y"] --> E["Summary table renders"]
  C --> E
  F["Admin logs in"] --> E
  E --> G["Name, new, old, total shown"]

To turn it on, open the voicemail record under Admin and set Show VM on Summary Screen to Y. The default is N for off, so nothing changes for boxes you don't flag. Keep it on for the two or three boxes you genuinely act on, and leave the rest off — a summary table with forty rows is just noise, and the point of this feature is to make the backlog obvious, not to bury it.

This setting sits inside the same voicemail record as the email, active, and greeting fields, so it is a one-checkbox change once you know where to look. If you're still mapping out how the audio side of all this fits together — prompts, greetings, and the audio store — the voicemail and audio prompts overview walks through the whole chain. And if you're deciding which boxes to even create first, adding a voicemail box is the natural first step.

None of this matters if standing up a clean VICIdial box is the part eating your week. We provision a dedicated, secured server in under 40 seconds — see pricing — so you can spend your time tuning settings like this one instead of patching Asterisk.