MAIL TO FAX GATEWAY
It is easy to setup a simple mail to fax gateway facility with the tools included in this distribution and some simple additions to your mail delivery agent configuration.
  1. Setup the HylaFAX software as usual.
  2. If your system uses sendmail to deliver mail, then follow the instructions in faxmail/mailfax.sh-sendmail. (Thanks to Eric Allman for the sendmail configuration hack.)
  3. If your system uses smail (e.g. Linux users), then follow the instructions in faxmail/mailfax.sh-smail.
  4. Restart your mail software, refreeze your configuration or whatever is necessary to cause the configuration changes to be seen by the system.
Voila! Now mail to user@dest.fax will get formatted and submitted as a facsimile job to user at the specified dest. By writing a more involved mailfax script you can add things like different resolutions by parsing the user string. For example, an X.400-style scheme might use:
    user/R=low/N=done@host.fax
where ``R=low'' specifies a low res facsimile and ``N=done'' requests notification when the job is done. If you want symbolic destinations, then you can provide a host to phone number mapping facility.

NOTE: The normal access control mechansims on submitting a facsimile for transmission are enforced; you may need to use them if you setup a fax gateway on your system!

NOTE: Dirk Husemann has contributed a more elaborate scheme that supports the transmission of MIME-encoded documents; check the FAQ.

There is also the "Remote Printing Experiment" being conducted by folks on the Internet. This provides a distributed fax delivery service that uses email to relay facsimile to a local site for delivery. For info about that stuff send mail to tpc-faq@town.hall.org or visit their WWW site.

HylaFAX table of contents.


Sam Leffler / sam@engr.sgi.com. Last updated $Date: 1995/02/20 01:21:22 $.