I run a small office that recently bought out our phone system from the original provider, and migrated to a new provider. I'm not a phone guy, but know networking and email pretty well, and make my living as a sound engineer.

Here's what I know: Our NEC system is an IPK II, with EliteMail LX. We've had it for 4 years, and our previous vendor managed to configure it to forward voicemail messages to an email address. With the migration, that functionality has stopped. My contractor on-site for the migration a few weeks back spent a while trying to troubleshoot the issue, but after 3 or 4 hours over a few days still had no luck. I can't afford to pay for him to scratch his head, so I've been searching ever since for help. A thorough review of this forum indicates I'm not the only one with this problem, but it seems to be rare.

The system as a whole is functioning fine, and voicemails are answered and stored correctly, as long as I'm here in the office, or dialing in remotely. The email integration feature is a licensed feature of our system. The main system and the VM server both have valid IP addresses. I can access the Web Pro and Elitemail web interfaces with what appears to be full admin-type access. This is a little scary since I want to be really careful not to make things worse.

I can use Putty to access the VM server via SSH, and that's where I think my problem may lie. We use an ISP for email - we don't have an Exchange system here. Under "Email Integration", it looks like I "name" the "post office", which is (and always was) "SOUND". The "Internet domain" I wasn't sure about. It had been "smtp.soundtraxnc.com" (our SMTP server). I changed it just to "soundtraxnc.com", since that's REALLY the domain name. The IP addresses are correct for the SMTP and IMAP servers. The "status" window is slightly different - it shows "EXCHANGE" even though I had no place to specify that (or not).

There's also an "EMAIL NOTIFICATION" menu with similar settings.

In the GUI manager, I specify "forward voicemail to email system", and also 'cause the online help said so, "access email from voicemail", even though we don't do that.

I've entered the "post office" as "sound", to match what I did in SSH, and the email name ("work") happens to match to a sender account we use in the office ([email protected]).

Before the cutover, the phone system was on a different network from our main network, but now it shares the same IP subnet as our office. I do have a firewall. Oh.

Maybe it's my firewall? I have no idea what ports/protocols I should tell it to permit. Before the cutover, the system was outside our firewall (and our subnet).

I can send screenshots if anyone's interested. I appreciate any insights you can offer.

Thanks,

Tom

Does the TCPIP setup have valid DNS addresses?

After changing the TCPIP settings in Putty, you should restart the voice messaging server, possibly stop the services then power cycle the LX board.

After re-booting go back into PuTTy any make sure the settings stayed.

D

Thanks, doghart. Here's the odd part: the TCP/IP setup only shows entries for an IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway. Those are correct. In other parts of the setup menus, the SMTP and IMAP servers are defined as IP addresses, so in theory DNS isn't needed for host name resolution. And I've double-checked to make sure the IPs for those are correct.
Is there another place where DNS addresses could possibly be entered?

-Tom

SO you can't go and talk to the person that had it working?

That person was me. We switched voice/data providers, but kept the system hardware. The previous vendor had a lot of trouble getting the feature to work too - I think we went back and forth a week or two before it finally worked, but then it DID work for a few years. My current NEC support tech hasn't had any luck, and I've spent almost $700 on his services.

So, wait a second, your email server changed? Have you tried initiating an SMTP session via a telnet off the VM server to see where it's failing?

No, the e-mail server didn't change. And as for testing SMTP from the VM server (outside of the VM software) I can't see where to do that. The system runs some flavor of Linux and I'm way out of my depth trying to make that happen via the SSH tool.
What changed was the ability of the server to send any voicemail-as-emails at all.

Well, I would suggest calling AVST and getting their tech support to help you.

I don't believe the LX is a supported product any longer.

Try using VMM or just plain VM instead of VM client.

Thanks, everyone. I know LX is way past end of life. That's why Deltacom/Earthlink was so eager to dump it on me.

Not sure what is meant by "VMM".

I feel like I'm 98% to where my system was a few weeks ago, but was hoping someone could offer a tip of where to look to get me past that last 2% hurdle.

Having the ability to forward VM to email is really handy, especially since we're a recording studio (that does a lot of voice recording), and it's a handy way for voice talent to leave a demo after hours that I can forward to a client. But we got by without it for a long time, and I guess I'm in that spot again. have a good weekend.
-Tom