A system for providing voice mail backup on a secondary server including two or more distributed voice mail servers. Each distributed voice mail server includes a telephony management software (TMS) unit, a telephony application programming interface (TAPI) unit, and an application unit. The application unit includes a voice mail control module, a call status module, a call transfer module, a voice mail migration module, a storage module, an audio encoding/decoding module, a configuration module, an extension library module, and a telephony application programming interface (TAPI) interface module. Each server is capable of storing a voice message for an extension serviced by a remote server if the remote server is unavailable.