[Emeriti-faculty] New voicemail system problems

[Ken Olum <kdo cosmos phy tufts edu>]

Hi, all.  There is a serious problem in the new voicemail system which
affects anyone who has their Tufts email forwarded to some other
server rather than keeping it on the University's Microsoft Exchange
server.  If you are in this situation, you will not get any voice
messages on your phone.  When some leaves a message for you, you will
get the message by email, but it will not be available from your
phone.

Here are the details.  As of this morning, we have "Unified
Messaging".  This means that when someone leaves you voice mail, the
voice mail is converted to email.  The audio message that the person
left is attached to the email as an audio file, and the system makes
some attempt to recognize the text of the message and puts that text
in the email also.  This email is sent to your Tufts email address
that has the form Firstname Lastname Tufts edu.

If you are doing the standard Tufts thing, this email goes into your
email at Microsoft Exchange.  You can read it, for example, by going
to https://exchange.tufts.edu or using Outlook.  If you have this
standard setup, everything is going to work fine.  When you call 75300
to check your voicemail, the system will look in your email inbox for
voice mail messages and play those for you.

The problem is if you are having your Tufts email forwarded somewhere
else.  Then what happens is that because the email isn't in your
Exchange email box, the voicemail system can't find it.  So it will
not light up the message light on your phone (if you have that) or
modify your dialtone.  If you call 75300 it will say that you have no
voice messages.

You can fix the problem by going to https://tuftstools.tufts.edu,
clicking on "I want to forward my Tufts Email" and setting "Save a
copy of the forwarded mail on the Tufts server" to "Yes".  Then it
will both forward and save all your email.  So you will get email with
your voicemail messages but they will also remain on the server where
the voicemail system will find them, and you'll get the service you
expected.  Of course it will also save a copy of all your regular
email that is send to your Tufts address.  This could eventually cause
a problem with your quota if you get a lot of big attachments, but
since the quota seems to be 2GB this won't happen easily.

Feel free to ask me if you need any help with this.

                                        Ken