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Voicemail to email

Swggy
Posts: 5
 Member Since:
2007-04-07
Submitted by Swggy on Sat, 01/12/2008 - 12:07pm.

OK, I'm no Linux scholar; and the little thing I want to do covers so much ground that I'm inundated when I use the obvious keywords in a search. So if this question's already been answered (and I'm sure it has-it feels like a VERY basic issue) could someone please point me to the answer? Problem is, it needs to be the exact answer with a step-by-step.

What I want to do is simply to route the voicemail files to email. Not a big deal, I know, but no one ever seems to do it locally – they all go out to their ISP. At home I've installed Trixbox (onto Centos 4.5) which installed Sendmail. For email I use Outlook, running on Windows XP on the same LAN. I get that Sendmail can't act as a POP/IMAP server for Outlook. I get that every sophisticated user hates Sendmail, but that doesn't help me when Trixbox chooses to install Sendmail by default. I see no point at all in sending mail from my Linux box to my ISP in order to get it back from there - not only because it's a waste of time, or because of the loss of privacy, but because of the nonsense I'd have to go through with the MX record and other DNS registration stuff. The box is already on the same LAN!!!

I've got Webmin running, and I can see that the voicemails are getting into Sendmail. I can access them in 'Read User Mail'.

I've loaded Dovecot, since I get that I have to have a POP or IMAP server for Outlook to talk to.

I think I’m just about there…but:

1. how do I tell Sendmail to send the mail to Dovecot? In the Webmin options for Sendmail, there’s an entry labeled ‘Send outgoing mail via host’ which presumably is Dovecot. So I put in ‘swggy.com’. How do I label Dovecot to be ‘swggy.com’? There’s got to be some way to identify it as such, but I haven’t found it.

2. once I’ve done that (and swggy.com is in the hosts file on both boxes), then presumably Outlook can find swggy.com as the mail server – except do I connect to ‘swggy.com’ or ‘pop.swggy.com’? And given that I use ‘asterisk’ as the username, what’s the password? The root password? That sounds a little dangerous even to me.

3. Outlook insists on having both pop & smtp access. I’m guessing that Sendmail is the smtp server, so can I just give Outlook the address ‘smtp.swggy.com’?

Again – I don’t want to get rid of Trixbox’s defaults – Sendmail stays. How to get emails from Sendamil into Dovecot, and get access into Dovecot for Outlook?

Thanks…

‹ Sound Quality - Music on Hold & etc. inbound to call group ›
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-- swggy


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KodaK
Posts: 1885
 Member Since:
2006-06-14
My head hurts after reading
Sat, 01/12/2008 - 12:28pm

My head hurts after reading this.

You seem to be saying "I want to drive this car, but I want to do it without wheels. Wheels are a hassle and besides it's already in the garage." Unless you run some sort of local name resolution service you can't have swggy.com point to anything internal to your network. You can do it with WINS, you can do it with a local DNS server, you can set up a hosts file on all of your internal machines, but you'd have to do something, even if it's on the LAN.

If you don't mind doing this by IP you can do it easily, just set up local users on the box and have outlook go to the IP of the trixbox server to retrieve the messages.

For example, let's say that your trixbox is at 192.168.1.5. Set that IP as your smtp and pop/imap server.

Add a user on the trixbox box:

adduser swggy
passwd swggy
(follow prompts)

Then mail sent to swggy@localhost (but ONLY from the trixbox) should get delivered to the local mail store. Then outlook can retrieve the voicemail. Note, you will NOT be able to send mail to swggy@localhost from your outlook and have it work. This is one direction only: from trixbox to outlook.

Like I said, though, if you want it to go to swggy.com then you're going to have to do quite a bit more work.

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WARNING: I no longer actively participate in these forums. My thoughts on trixbox in a nutshell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4xBMkWu1pE Use AsteriskNOW instead.


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Swggy
Posts: 5
 Member Since:
2007-04-07
Got it!!!
Sat, 01/12/2008 - 1:25pm

Oh bliss! You nailed it. That was exactly what I needed - set it up and tested it in 45 seconds flat.

As for your metaphor - it's more like "I've got this car. I know how to turn it on. How do I get it out of the garage? There's this door thingy in the way" - yes, it was that straight forward. I didn't realize I could just use the IP address in Outlook (although it makes sense in retrospect). And no, I have no interest in sending emails into Trixbox.

Thanks a bunch...
-- swggy

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-- swggy


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