The VICIdial voicemail ID and password fields

Two fields decide whether a VICIdial voicemail box works at all: the ID and the password. Skip either one on the add form and the record won't save. They're the only truly required settings on a new box, and they're easy to get slightly wrong, so it's worth understanding exactly what each does.

Short version: the ID is the box's address, and the password is the key to listen to what's inside it. Here's the longer version.

The voicemail ID

The Voicemail ID is the all-numbers identifier for the box. It's how VICIdial and Asterisk underneath it know which mailbox a message belongs to. A few rules apply:

• Numbers only — no spaces, no letters, no punctuation.
• At least two characters long.
• Unique — it can't match an existing voicemail ID, and it can't match the ID of any phone on the system.

That uniqueness rule matters because every phone you create already has a voicemail box keyed to its own ID. If your general box reused one of those numbers, messages would collide. Keeping general-box IDs in their own number range — say four digits starting with a digit your phones never use — avoids the clash entirely.

The password

The Password is what you enter to get into the box and listen to messages after dialing in. It's two to ten characters. Like the ID, it's not optional — the form rejects a save without it. Because anyone who knows the ID and password can play back messages, treat it like any other credential and don't reuse a password across boxes that different teams check.

How someone uses them to check messages

The pair works together at check time. An agent or supervisor dials the voicemail-check Extension (the internal number that opens the mailbox menu) from a Hardphone (deskphone) or Softphone, enters the box ID, then enters the password. If both match, VICIdial plays the new and old messages and offers the usual save, delete, and skip options.

sequenceDiagram
  participant A as Agent phone
  participant V as VICIdial
  participant B as Voicemail box
  A->>V: Dial voicemail check extension
  V->>A: Prompt for box ID
  A->>V: Enter Voicemail ID
  V->>A: Prompt for password
  A->>V: Enter Password
  V->>B: Match ID and password
  B->>A: Play new and old messages

Notice that the box has to be active for any of this to work. If Active is set to N, you can't leave a message and you can't check one — the ID and password become irrelevant until you switch it back on. That's worth knowing when a box that "used to work" suddenly seems empty.

If you'd rather not dial in at all, you can route messages to email instead, which we cover in setting up voicemail-to-email. Even then, the ID and password still define the box; email is just a second delivery path. For the bigger picture of how greetings, prompts, and boxes fit together, our audio prompts and voicemail guide walks the whole chain. A box can also play a custom greeting pulled from the audio store, the same one your IVR (interactive voice response) and Call menu prompts come from.

Get the ID and password right once and the box just works. If you're still hunting for a server to set one up on, we provision a dedicated, secured VICIdial box in under 40 seconds — see pricing and you can be choosing your first voicemail ID within the minute.