sending fax

[Julian H. Stacey]

Polytropon wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Sep 2014 11:12:33 -0400, Littlefield, Tyler wrote:
> > I keep having to send faxes to people who really should accept emails 
> > instead but don't. I'm in a dorm and have no clue where a phone line 
> > would even be connected, even if I had a modem to use. I was wondering 
> > if there's a way to do this through BSD? Just prepare the fax somehow on 
> > the desktop side and let BSD send it off? I could get a number from any 
> > number of places I think and just use that as my outbound. Any ideas/etc 
> > would be awesome.
> 
> I've been "inventing" something like that more than a decade
> ago: You send an e-mail with a PDF attachment to a specific
> address, e. g. fax at example.com, then specify the fax number
> in the subject. A remote server, connected to a serial modem
> (connected to a phone line with a fax number) would then send
> it, using Hylafax.


Long ago when I created /usr/ports/comms/hylafax/ there was a public
service that did roughly that, at least for email to fax transmission, 
not fax to email reception; Nodes in various countries.  It
was sponsored by prepending advertising in 1st half page of fax.

I considered setting up a node, but didn't as:
- I was concerned about legal issues that could relate to unsolicited 
  faxes, that could be used for harassment, porn, banned political
  agitation/propaganda, or just plain bulk advertising by 3rd
  parties, consuming a lot of phone bill (flat rate phone calls
  didn't exist in Germany back then I recall.

- I'm British, but in Germany, & German law strikes me as weird in 
  some ways (best discussed over a beer ;-) so I avoided legal
  minefields best navigated by born natives of the country.

- Seemed it might also be a lot of time consuming tedious work to run, 
  with legalistic complaint/ correspondence in to me foreign German
  language, dealing with clueless recipients/ complainers.

- Advertising to general public was of no benefit to my
  Unix consultancy business.

- Running a node to carry advertising space sellable to others would 
  have been more interesting, but perhaps at risk of greater liability.

If people in various countries have the native lanuage of their
country of residence, & brave enough to risk their legal issues &
have spare secretarial support time to spend dealing with general
public, then by all means see if that service project is still
active & if so, set up an extra mail to fax node using Hylafax.

There were references to that service project either in the Hylafax
sources &/ or on http://www.hylafax.org which is where I discovered
it long ago.  Tyler's question seems to have nothing intrincicly
requiring FreeBSD, just looking for a fax service, so he'd be better
asking on a mail list here:
	http://www.hylafax.org/content/Support


> I'm quite sure there is an online service that you can use
> which implements something comparable, usually through a
> web interface.

Yes 

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Linux Unix C Sys Eng Consultant Munich http://berklix.com
		Interleave replies Below, like a play script.