RE: flexfax: SuSE 6.3, latest Hylafax and SupraFax288

[Kenneth Cornetet <kcornet@kimball.com>]

Title: RE: flexfax: SuSE 6.3, latest Hylafax and SupraFax288

I think the biggest attraction of faxes over email is gauranteed delivery. If I put a paper in a fax machine, and fax it to you, and the fax machine doesn't complain, I have a *reasonable* reason to believe you will recieve it.

Email, on the other hand, may or may not be delivered (without any error messages), or may be delivered up to days later.

What would be better than internet based fax machines (IMHO) is reliable return-receipt-requested email. This, of course, raises privacy concerns. Perhaps what is needed is a reliable acknowledgement that the email was at least recieved by the final delivery point (unix mail spool file, exchange server, notes server, OfficeVision, whatever).

-----Original Message-----
From: Aristedes Maniatis [mailto:ari@ish.com.au]
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2000 7:40 PM
To: Nico Kadel-Garcia
Cc: Hylafax list
Subject: Re: flexfax: SuSE 6.3, latest Hylafax and SupraFax288

>> Personally I can't wait till the current concept of faxing goes away and is
>> replaced by something a little more robust (like an IP based transmission).
>
> I agree! This was part of what PDF was written for, but HP's deliberate
> stranglehold on the protocol and lack of cheap PDF editing tools has
> crippled the market.

PDF is only half the solution. Sending files by email is already replacing
faxing in many situations, however people will still want to poke little
pieces of paper into a machine to send handwritten or printed material. The
current generation of scanners are still not easy enough, although we are
getting there with the HP all-in-one machines which integrate the scanner
with email software.

It is Adobe, not HP who have control of the PDF format. They invented
postscript and then PDF as an extension of that. But I don't think Adobe is
preventing growth in this area.

What really needs to be developed is a fax machine with an ethernet port in
the back. It then sends the fax as an email or perhaps some new protocol
over IP without the need for additional software. Then perhaps we could move
away from point-to-point dial faxing.

Anyhow - my apologies to the list for meandering off the immediate topic -
getting Hylafax to actually work with the bulk of (buggy) modems out there.

>
> Nico Kadel-Garcia
> Senior Engineer, CIRL
> Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
> raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu
>

Cheers
Ari Maniatis

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