Here’s the second installment of the SwyxWare v6.12 feature blog posts. Similar to part 1, this change was rather easy, too. But in the end it cost more time than we anticipated.

SwyxWare used to send voicemail with a wav-file attachment named

voicemail.wav

Some time ago we learned that some customers archive these attachments on hard disks. But with every attachment named “voicemail.wav” this wasn’t easy. Therefore SwyxWare v6.12 uses a better naming scheme. Voicemail attachments are now formatted like:

Voicemail-yyMMdd-hhmm-callerid-callername.ext

Date, time and the caller information are the same as in the email body, therefore extending the format was easy.

A few days before the scheduled release date we got a report from a colleague who couldn’t listen to his voicemail via remote inquiry. We hadn’t changed the IMAP4 component for v6.12. And the RI script change we made for v6.12 was unsuspicious, too. And we couldn’t reproduce the bug in our labs.

The root cause was the callername in the attachment file name. That colleague had a phone book entry for the caller, so that entry’s name had been inserted into the attachment name. The phone book entry in question used some non-ascii character, German umlauts in this case, e.g. “Ernst Müller”. The mail server correctly escaped the special characters in the IMAP protocol, but our IMAP module couldn’t handle that and just ignored the name. In addition Exchange 2003 seems to have a bug in this area too, and escapes the attachment name incorrectly. Because German speaking countries are our biggest market and umlauts are quite common, we couldn’t release v6.12 with this bug.

We fixed IpPbxIMAP4.dll, but in the end this small feature caused the release to slip a few days.