flexfax: Mail-to-Fax HylaFAX relay and RelayFax

[Lee Howard <faxguy@deanox.com>]

Before now I have used a product called RelayFax (http://www.relayfax.com)
to handle my business faxing both receiving and sending.  It's
Windows-based, which is the largest factor in my changeover to HylaFAX.
Since the day I installed it I had general WinOS problems with it (aka
crashes), and I tend to believe that its server-side programming is flaky
because it would inevitably load multiple-instances of itself, causing no
fax sending or receiving to occur.

To the point... I've been very pleased with HylaFAX's receiving and
delivery these past days since I managed to get it configured properly.
Thanks to a useful couple of faxrcvd scripts by Noel Burton-Krahn and a bit
of tweaking, HylaFAX delivers incoming mail to my remote mail account as
TIF attachments.  I really like this, as I enjoy having the bulk of my
correspondence come to my by e-mail.  Also I get a lot of junk faxes (as
well as other spam e-mail), which I don't want to have printed.  And I hate
paper in general anyway.

The most convenient feature, of RelayFax, and the feature for which I chose
to purchase it after its 30-day trial period, was its mail-to-fax relay.  I
found it VERY user-friendly, and the Windows-client user interface is
attractive and powerful.  With mail-to-faxing I can fax from my remote
offices without getting additional fax lines.  RelayFax client works as a
printer driver and sends a formatted e-mail to an account with the TIF fax
file MIME encoded as an attachment.  The RelayFax server gets the e-mail
and then faxes the TIF file using the fax recipient information in the
formatted text part of the email (not the e-mail address itself).  I find
this method to be VERY convenient and self-contained.

I'll let you have your opinions here, but I don't like the sendmail and DNS
mangling that has to occur with following the "common" user@dest.fax forms
that I've seen with faxmail/mailfax.sh
(http://www.hylafax.org/faxgateway.php) or Qfax (previously at
http://www.renaissoft.com/Qfax/).  It seems so much more self-sufficient
for that same script or package to extract the needed information itself
from the e-mail.  It seems just as easy to place the fax number in the
subject line or in the text as it does to place it in the e-mail address
field.  Furthermore (and my real motivation here)... by using a script that
does this I can continue to use my RelayFax software as Windows clients and
use HylaFAX as my server-side software.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a pre-written script that does what I need.
I have found a mail2fax.pl script that could be worked-over to function,
but I know very little about creating Perl scripts (I can modify them fine
enough, but can't create them).  What I need the script to do is this:

1. frequently check for mail in a dedicated outbound-fax mail account (even
on a remote server)
2. extract information from text in the mail's format (i.e. read a line
"FAXNUMBER: 5551212" and interpret 5551212 to be the send-to fax number)
3. check the username and a password (which can also be parsed from the
e-mail text) against a valid user-list
4. decode the MIME encoded TIF attachment to a file
5. place the fax in the HylaFAX outbound fax queue
6. reply via e-mail to the fax sender on the completion or error status of
the fax

There are a lot more features that could be added (i.e. phone books), but
those are the basics.  Anyway, I would greatly appreciate it if someone
could give me some pointers on this, especially the simple things like: A)
how do you place a fax into the HylaFAX send queue, with faxsend?, B) how
do you decode a MIME encoded attachment?, C) how do you download e-mail
into a file (I always use my GUI client, and it does the POP work)?  Maybe
I'm biting off more than I can chew here?

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Lee Howard