flexfax: sending only a coverpage

[Lee Howard <faxguy@deanox.com>]

I'm modifying a .procmailrc file that handles outbound fax requests on an
email-to-fax gateway to allow the sending of a coverpage only as a "small
note"

In order to execute sendfax from the rc file a pipe command is used, and
the mail is consequently sent to sendfax as standard input.  This is fine
when a filename is specified because stdin is ignored, but when a filename
is not specified sendfax accepts the standard input (which in my case is
the mail being piped to it) as the body of the fax.

Obviously this isn't what I want (who wants e-mail header info and all that
being faxed anywhere?).  So, I tried to avoid this by using an empty file
called noattachment (zero bytes) as the specified filename, however, I get
the following error from sendfax:

[koopa@redhat koopa]$ sendfax -R -c "comments" -d "7550959" noattachment
noattachment: Empty file

No fax is sent and procmail detects the error which ends up putting the
mail in the mailbox ultimately.

So apparently sendfax doesn't like my workaround.  I'm not far from
deciding to get my job done with a perl script rather than entirely relying
on procmail, but does anyone have any ideas on how I can supress the
standard input from becoming the body of the fax?

Thanks.

Lee Howard