Voicemail maxsilence Must Be Less Than minsecs

The Problem

Asterisk logs a warning at startup:

maxsilence should be less than minsecs or you may get empty messages

What These Settings Do

In voicemail.conf [general]:

• minsecs: Minimum duration (in seconds) for a voicemail to be kept. Messages shorter than this are silently discarded. Prevents saving empty or accidental messages. Default: 0 (disabled).
• maxsilence: Number of seconds of silence before Asterisk stops recording. Acts as an auto-hangup for callers who walk away. Default: 0 (disabled).

The Conflict

If maxsilence >= minsecs, Asterisk could stop recording after maxsilence seconds of silence, producing a message that is exactly maxsilence seconds long, which would then be discarded for being shorter than minsecs.

The caller thinks they left a message, but it gets thrown away.

Fix

Ensure maxsilence is strictly less than minsecs:

[general]
minsecs = 3      ; discard messages shorter than 3 seconds
maxsilence = 2   ; stop recording after 2 seconds of silence

If you do not want silence detection, set maxsilence = 0 to disable it entirely.