Forwarding old extension

[bt602]

I have an old extension, no longer active in our system, from an old employee that left the company.  Turns out people are still reaching out to this employee by selecting this extension, based on some old emails (Signature on old emails has this extension listed). 

In my testing, when I call the extension, I get a message "The person you're trying to reach us unavailable.  goodbye." and then it hangs up.  I could never find any reference to the 103 extensions  in the Zoom system since we removed the old employees account.  

This has become an issue because the extension is basically a hole people can end up in when they call that extension.

So, as a workaround, I created a new basic user account and assigned this 103 extension to this new account.  My thinking is I could use this basic account as basically a ghost account to forward this extension to an active extension.  

I'm still struggling to complete this forwarding process and I'm still receiving the "The person you're trying to reach..." message when I call the 103 extension.  Based on how I have it configured, I would think it may ring for up to 15 seconds but then forward to the selected extension.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

[Manny5429]

@bt602 If the DID associated to the extension was not ported to your current phone system, you may try this and see if this works: 

1. Create an Auto Receptionist (AR) - Name it with your desired AR name. 

2. assign extension 103 to this AR. 

3. For business hour, you can Route the call to several options that you want: IVR, VM, User, etc... 

4. If you want to play a message that says this extension is no longer used by the previous user, you can select IVR and record a greeting or you can immediately route it to a VM (just make sure you have a VM greeting). 

The AR option can allow you to assign yourself to have access to the voicemail of this AR. 

Note: this will only work if the caller did not dial the DID associated to extension 103, meaning they called the main company number and go thru the dial by extension option.