I've seen a system in a corporate environment (EchoPass, to be
precise) in which phone messages are saved as .wav (or .mp3, or other
sound-type) files and sent as e-mail attachments to the designated
recipient. This is not too hard to do if you are running a voice
messaging application that saves messages as .wav (etc.) files by
default (lots of pc-based answering "machines" do this). You can just
write a little script to shoot the files off the appropriate e-mails.

But what I'd like to do is have messages in my cell/home phones'
answering services forwarded to me via e-mail. I don't have control of
these answering services (they're handled by the providers), and as
far as I know, the only way to get messages is to retrieve them by
brute force - call a number, enter a password, then press the right
buttons to get all the messages.

I imagine that an application that would do this for me would
regularly (hourly? whatever) check messages (perhaps after being
trained as to the interaction details of your messaging provider), and
store each message as it's own .wav file locally. Once it's done that
it might forwards the message as an e-mail attachment. Or perhaps
there's another way for an application to do this, using some
back-alley TAPI method of message retrieval, and such an application
exists.  Or perhaps such a service is offered by AT&T or Qwest (my two
providers), and I just haven't seen it yet.

So my request is: identify an application available for an
individual's use which will retrieve messages from multiple aswering
service as described above. Or secondarily, point me to information
showing that the providers listed above offer such a service. Extra
points (really) for software that will run on Linux, especially
open-source, so I can tweak it if it's not quite right.   (note: if a
application doesn't exist, but a fleshed-out code-base - not just a
TAPI library - that I can work with does exist, that's ok, too).  
Whew...

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Request for Question Clarification by voyager-ga on 21 Jan 2003 05:04 PST

Hi mushnik_jehosophat,

why don't you just tell your service provider to reroute your
undeliverable calls to your computer's phone number and use an
answering machine software there? That way you will have all your
messages located at one place, you still can call your answering
machine from every one of your cell phones as well as from normal
phones, can tweak the answering service according to your needs and
can install an open source linux solution... that's at least the way
we do it at the place where I work.

Just a suggestion.

Bye,

voyager-ga

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Clarification of Question by mushnik_jehosophat-ga on 21 Jan 2003 06:57 PST

It's a good question, which I probably should have answered in my
original post (though I was worried that it was getting way too
long!).  I've got two problems with going that route:

1) I'd like to be able to do this for my cell phone, my wife's cell
phone, and our home phone. We only have one home phone line (yippee
for broadband!), so rerouting the calls to my computer's line would
amount to routing it to my home line. I don't want work-related calls
to my cell phone to be routed to my home phone, because the call is
likely to be answered with a generic "hello!"...not particularly
personal or buisiness-like :>    This holds true for my wife's cell #,
too.

2) My desktop has pretty good uptime, but doesn't come with the same
kind of assurances that you get from a server with a dedicated
sysadmin. Most importantly, if have a hardware problem, and I'm busy
that week, I won't get around to fixing it for a while - which means I
wouldn't get any messages in the meantime. It's the problem with being
small-scale (i.e. home-use). I like the idea of letting the big
corporate servers handle the task of capturing the messages, and only
relying on my system to do the retrieval - so if there's a failure on
my system, I can still recover manually.

In a windows environment, I would attempt to use different pieces of
software for the component parts of the job (phone dialer, etc.)
underneath a framework of an automation program such as automate,
available for free 15-day trial from
http://download.com.com/3000-2094-10181518.html.  After the trial, the
software is US$79.

The Asterisk OpenSource PBX would be a great place for you to start.
Check out http://asterisk.org/ for more info. It has a scripting
interface called EAGI that allows your script to dynamically respond
to any type of input. You can send DTMF tones to log into a voicemail
system, wait a specified number of seconds, record for a number of
seconds or until a tone is heard, and then package the resulting
recording into an email and send it off. In fact, Asterisk comes with
its own voicemail system that can send the audio file to an email
address automatically. Asterisk is specifically built to do this sort
of thing.

However, the problems I see with a voicemail retrieval system like
this are many: the script would need to be able to interpret from the
provider's voicemail attendant whether messages were available; it
would need to discern then end of a voicemail message to know when to
stop recording; it would need to have some sort of safety so that
messages were not deleted from the provider's system until the message
was successfully recorded and delivered. And so on...

I think voyager-ga is on the right track -- if I needed a similar
system, I'd give business contacts a phone number that connects them
directly to the Asterisk system. Then Asterisk could call your
cellphone and let it ring for, say, six seconds (whatever is
appropriate to avoid the cellphone provider's voicemail system from
picking up), and it you didn't answer within that time, Asterisk might
offer the caller another extension or its own voicemail system, which
is already email-enabled.

If this is a project with a budget, feel free to contact me for
implementation assistance. If it's just a hobby thing, then read the
asterisk-users list archives, join the list, and have fun with open
source telephony! I don't work for Digium, but I use Asterisk often.

Hope this helps,
roderickm-ga

Thanks for the direction, roderickm. After a cursory look, Asterisk
seems to fit the bill. It's just a hobby thing, so I'll take a look at
the asterisk-users list when free time comes available.

Since the question has closed itself, I'm not sure if it's possible
for you to get credit for the solution...if so, post an answer and
I'll accept it.

Thanks for the offer of credit, but I'm not an official ga researcher.
While I'd enjoy being paid to answer, I am glad to hear my comment
may've helped you.