telephone answering + voice mail + recording

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 16:43:13 +0000,
  g <geleem at bellsouth.net> wrote:
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> greets,
> 
> would like to set up a system to answer telephone calls, voice mail,
> record phone conversations for home use.
> 
> any and all suggestions and comments [regarding 'subject:'] welcome.

You might also take a look at callweaver. They are derived from asterisk,
but have more open development.

If you are looking to buy hardware to handle POTS, be sure to look around.
You can use cheap modem cards, but they aren't supposed to work as well.
Be careful if you look at Digium hardware. They don't want to get their
drivers in the mainline kernel so getting updates for them are going to
require using a third party repository. You may want to look at other
companies' hardware to see if you can find something better supported
for a comparable price.