How convenient is it to have your voicemails accessible from Microsoft Teams! But what if they Disappear from Teams History? I thought it was something simple. I was wrong. Here is a situation I came across:
Example of Voicemails Disappear from Teams History
A user receives a call from an internal number (person in the organization), they receive an email with voicemail. It shows in their Teams Activity that the caller left a voicemail, and the voicemail is also shown in their Teams call history. However, when a user receives a call from an external user (person outside the organization), they receive an email with the voicemail. It shows in their Teams Activity that the caller left a voicemail, BUT the voicemail is not shown in their Teams call history.
I guess some users do not get very much voicemail or the transcription they get in their Exchange mailboxes is not enough. If your user like getting voicemails through teams and they start disappearing, you will find out soon enough!! In my case it was only external voicemails, but it might be both internal and external. It all depends on where the underlying issue is.
Researching on Google didn’t turn up much information. I only found one article and it didn’t say much. The only hint I gleaned from it was maybe an exchange rule might be causing the issue. That put me on the right track….
How it was resolved
Looking at a few users I could roughly figure out when notices of external voicemail stopped showing up in their Teams. It was right about the time we employed a third-party service that scanned our emails for spam, phishing, and malware. It broke our voicemail behavior. It caused voicemails to Disappear from Teams History.
The tool is a combination of mail rules and connectors in Exchange that effectively send incoming emails out to be checked and if they are clean, it sends them back. Specifically, an Exchange rule. It must be tweaked to allow emails that contained external voicemails as an exception. By doing that the link in teams was restored and Voicemail started behaving normally again! See the screenshot below for an example.
The Moral of the Story
M365 is an integrated ecosystem. If you deploy third-party tools, be prepared for things to break. I would like to tell you Microsoft will help, but they won’t. You will be left to your own devices or helpful bloggers :p
Dan
I am an IT professional with over twenty years experience in the field. I have supported thousands of users over the years. The organizations I have worked for range in size from one person to hundreds of people. I have performed support from Help Desk, Network / Cloud Administration, Network Support, Application Support, Implementation and Security.