The VICIdial voicemail options field

Most voicemail box settings in VICIdial are friendly checkboxes: active or not, email or not, this greeting or that one. The Voicemail Options field is the opposite — a single freeform text field where you can pass additional, lower-level voicemail settings straight through to Asterisk. It is the escape hatch for behavior the standard fields don't expose.

It comes with the bluntest advice in the whole voicemail record: leave it blank unless you know what you are doing. That isn't gatekeeping — it's that this field hands you the raw mailbox options, and a typo here changes how the box behaves without a friendly error to catch it.

What it's for

Underneath VICIdial, every mailbox is an Asterisk voicemail entry, and Asterisk supports a set of per-mailbox options that the standard VICIdial form doesn't surface as checkboxes. The Voicemail Options field is where those extra settings go. The kinds of things people reach for here include:

• Attaching the audio file to the email rather than just sending a notification.
• Tuning how the message timestamp and date are read back to the caller or in email.
• Controlling whether the caller can review or re-record before saving, and the silence/length thresholds Asterisk applies.

Because it's freeform, the field doesn't validate what you type. VICIdial passes it down, and Asterisk either honors it or quietly ignores a malformed entry. There's no green check telling you it worked — you confirm by testing the box.

The careful way to use it

If you do have a reason to touch it, treat it like editing a Conf file by hand: change one thing, test, then change the next. The blast radius is a single box, which is reassuring, but the failure mode is silent. A workflow that keeps you out of trouble:

1. Decide the exact behavior you want and which Asterisk option produces it.
2. Set it on a throwaway test box first, not your live callback box.
3. Leave a message, check it by phone, and check the email if forwarding is on.
4. Only then copy the value to the box that matters.

Most of what people want from this field is already covered by the named settings — email delivery, delete-after-email, the greeting chooser, the zone. Reach for Voicemail Options only when the behavior you need genuinely isn't one of those. The decision tree is short:

flowchart TD
  A["Want to change mailbox behavior"] --> B{"Is there a named field for it?"}
  B -- Yes --> C["Use the named setting"]
  B -- No --> D{"Do you know the Asterisk option?"}
  D -- No --> E["Leave Voicemail Options blank"]
  D -- Yes --> F["Add it on a test box"]
  F --> G["Verify by leaving a message"]
  G --> H["Apply to the real box"]

Where this field interacts most is email. Several of the most common reasons people open it — attaching audio, formatting the message body, controlling timestamps — overlap with how forwarding works, so it pays to have voicemail-to-email set up and understood before you start tuning options. The format your attached audio rides in matters too — whether it's G.711 codec WAV or GSM affects file size and playback, which is part of the broader audio prompts and voicemail picture. Even a stored greeting or TTS (text to speech) prompt obeys the same store rules.

Editing low-level mailbox options is far less nerve-wracking on a box you can rebuild in seconds. We provision a clean, secured VICIdial server in under 40 seconds — see pricing — so your test box is never precious.