Troubleshooting Voicemail to email on an Allworx System

This post will focus on the use of Voicemail to email without the use of a smart host on an Allworx System, however the contents should be applicable for any system. If you require that the email be sent only internally on the local network, then the Allworx system should be upgraded to 7.3 or above and the email pop client should be used instead of a smart-host.

There no configuration on the Allworx that needs to be done for Voice Mail to Email functionality to work other than setting up the message Alias. By default the Allworx will send email out of it’s gateway. The email will then be routed through the Internet to the destination server.

This is typically where you will run into problems. Since the Allworx does not have a registered DNS name, any mail being received by the destination server will be discarded. You can check this by doing the following.

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C:\>nslookup Allworx.inscitec.com

Server: dns.mia.bellsouth.net
Address: 205.152.144.23

*** dns.mia.bellsouth.net can't find Allworx.inscitec.com: Non-existent domain
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So you can see that the domain our Allworx is sending out does not exist as a real domain. This is exactly what an Exchange server will do before allowing email to be sent to it. In order for the exchange server to receive this, one of two things will need to happen.

The first option is to add the Wan IP Address of the Allworx into a white list on their server. When the email is received from the Allworx the Exchange server will see that the IP Address is valid and allow the email to come in even though the DNS does not exist. This is probably the simplest solution, however it is really not the best solution. If you have a hosted email server it is common that the company hosting it could refuse to white-list an IP address.

The second option is to create a DNS entry for the allworx. If the you already have a domain and you are able to manage the DNS for this domain then you can create an A record to point to the Allworx WAN IP address. For instance if I owned example.com I could create a new A record for allworx.example.com and point it to the Allworx WAN IP address. You would then need to change the hostname of the allworx under the configuration tab to be allworx.example.com. Now when you do an nslookup you will get a valid DNS lookup.

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C:\Users\Admin>nslookup allworx.example.com
Server: dns.mia.bellsouth.net ← This is the DNS Server that is handling the Look-up.
Address: 205.152.144.23

Name: allworx.example.com
Address: 71.43.90.154 ← this should match the Allworx WAN IP
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If email is still not working after verifying this then I would suggest that you start a packet capture from the WAN port of the Allworx and leave a VM on an extension that has VM to Email. Give the Allworx about 15 seconds before stopping the capture to make sure that the email has been sent.

Open the Wire-shark capture and filter by SMTP. You should be able to see the email trying to be sent. Typically on the last row of the SMTP transaction you will find the packet with an error being sent back from the destination server.