Voicemail does not record, notify or play back

Identify which stage failed

Can the caller reach the correct greeting? Does a message appear in the mailbox? Can the user retrieve it? Does the phone show a waiting-message indicator? Treat each answer as a separate branch rather than resetting the phone immediately.

Voicemail has four distinct stages

If the greeting is wrong or missing

Check the unanswered-call destination and the mailbox context. Confirm the mailbox exists and the call reaches the intended application. On FreePBX, inspect the extension voicemail settings and GUI routing; avoid editing generated Asterisk files.

If recording or playback fails

Check mailbox capacity, filesystem space and service permissions. Compare one controlled message with the failure. If the stored message is silent, inspect the inbound media path; if it contains audio but playback is silent, investigate the retrieval leg instead.

If only notification fails

Check the phone's mailbox association and subscription behavior. Email notifications have a separate delivery path and may fail despite a valid local message. When local playback succeeds but email does not, use the FreePBX voicemail-to-email investigation to separate mailbox policy, Asterisk's mail command, local transport, relay acceptance and recipient handling. Do not expose voicemail retrieval without authentication to simplify access. Finish by testing greeting, message deposit, retrieval and notification together, then remove any temporary diagnostic capture.

If the message exists and retrieval works but the lamp is stale, continue with the MWI-specific evidence path. It keeps mailbox state, mapping, SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY behavior and the phone interface as separate layers.

Prove whether Blink suppressed the voicemail branch

Blink documents Reject as a 603 decision that can cancel voicemail, Busy as 486 that leaves server routing active, and Escape as local silence without a SIP response. The Blink inbound-disposition diagnostic provides a fixed three-attempt test before changing mailbox settings.

Separate mailbox counts from recording, retrieval and notification symptoms

Use the AMI mailbox-query diagnostic to isolate identity, field mapping, store freshness and cache faults before changing voicemail flow.

Separate missing users from missing messages

Use the voicemail-user diagnostic to isolate node, module, context, framing, parsing and cache faults.

Diagnose rejected or over-broad MWI controls

Use the AMI MWI control diagnostic for release, module, scope, mailbox, count and EntityID faults.