If you installed VitalPBX from the ISO on our website or made a Debian installation from scratch, the timezone was set at installation. However, you might need to change your timezone if you have used a VPS system that uses images to create your systems.

We will go to Admin > System Settings > System Misc to do this. From here, we will go to the Time tab. We will look into the other Tabs later.

Here, you can change the time and date to your liking. You can also add NTP servers if you want specific servers for your system clock. In the bottom section, you can check the system’s Clock Status. This will tell you the exact time for your system.

Next, let’s look into configuring the email client for VitalPBX. We will go to Admin > System Settings> Email Settings.

In this module, you can configure the external email client or built-in server to send email messages from your VitalPBX installation. This is important so you can send notifications and emails concerning various configurations from your PBX.

This will be useful for sending welcome emails from templates we will look into later. This can also help with Voicemail to Email, Fax to Email, System Notifications, and more.

You can pick between using the built-in server or an external mail server. Additionally, you can use a Gmail account with the External Mail Server option. If you go with this option, make sure you create an application password for your Gmail account, or else email sending might fail.

Once you have entered your configurations, click Save.

You can test your configurations by entering an email address in the Test Saved Email Settings field and clicking the envelope button to its right.

In the Email Log section, if you click on Refresh, you will see the email log output, and you can use this to troubleshoot if there is an issue with receiving the test email.

For this, we will go to Admin > System Settings > Monitoring. You will find the Notifications and Storage tabs here.

In the Notifications tab, you can define a From Address from which the emails will be sent. This can be a different “From” address than the email you configured in the email settings. Make sure you use the same domain as the one configured in your email settings and that your email server permits this.

You can also enter the emails to which Storage and Intrusion Notifications will be sent.

You can then click on Save.
Next, we can move to the Storage tab.
You can configure the threshold to send you the storage notification email and enable/disable this notification.

Once you set your setting, click on Save.

Here, you can customize 5 email templates.

• New Voicemail Email – This is an email sent to an extension’s email address(es)
  when an incoming call is sent to voicemail.
• Extension Welcome Email – This is an email notification sent to a user when their
  extension is created.
• Emergency Notification Email – This is an email notification sent when an
  Emergency Number is dialed.
• Tenant Welcome Email – This is an email notification sent to a new Tenant
  Administrator user when a tenant is created for them.
• Missed Call – This is an email sent to an extension user when a call is missed.

For these templates, you have two options under the Action column. You can edit the template, or you can send a test email to test how the email looks. Let’s take a look at the New Voicemail Email template first. Click on the green Edit button in the Action column next to it.

Here, you can edit the From Email and Name, as well as the Subject and Body. To the right, we have a list of variables we can use to have dynamic information in our template. For now, we will leave these with the default values. If you make any changes, you can click on the green Update button in the bottom-right corner. To return to the email templates list, click on the blue Return button.

Now, let’s look at the Extension Welcome Email. Similarly, click on the green Edit button
under the Actions column for this template.

As you can see, this one looks a bit different than the Voicemail Email template. This is how the Extension Welcome, Emergency Notification, and New Tenant email templates look when you edit them.

You can still change the From Name, From Email, and Subject in the section above where we find the Email Body. The body uses a complete WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. This supports different font styling, links, and a full HTML editor. This way, you can make these welcome and notification emails as attractive and on-brand as you want.

By default, these come will a default template, but you can edit this to anything you like.

You will see that we still use variables to make the email contents dynamic. These can be found in the Variables dropdown menu. You can place these variables anywhere in the email body or subject line.

For now, we can leave these with their default content. If you make any changes, you can press the Update button in the lower right-hand corner.

As mentioned before, the Emergency Notification and New Tenant email templates work the same way as the Extension Welcome. Feel free to work on the different designs you can create incorporating the available variables to customize the emails sent.