Re: [hylafax-users] faxmail prologue / created ps contains leading blank page

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tony Delov wrote:

> Lee Howard wrote:
>
> > What you probably really want is to just write some very simple shell 
> > code taking the mail from your MDA, decoding the attachment, and then 
> > faxing the attachment with sendfax.
>
> This is something I could do with as well.
> I would love to hear of anyone that uses any such scripts and how they 
> might have it set up. 


Your MTA/MDA will pass e-mail on standard input to other programs... so 
in an easy example, you would use a .forward file or a pipe in your 
aliases file to pass the e-mail to an executable shell script like this:

#!/bin/sh
cat > file.mail

This effectively sends the mail that was passed to the script on 
standard input into the file.mail file.  From here you can parse the 
e-mail headers or body for information by which to determine fax 
destination and other parameters... and you can decode any base64 MIME 
attachments or uuencoded attachments and attach those decoded files to 
your sendfax command.  So as a very, very simplistic example:

#!/bin/sh
cat > file.mail
SUBJECT=`grep -e "^subject:" -i file.mail | sed q | sed -e 
's/^[Ss]ubject:[ ]*//g'`
export METAMAIL_TMPDIR=/my/tmp/dir
metamail -w -x file.mail > /dev/null 2>&1
sendfax -d $SUBJECT /my/tmp/dir/*
exit $?

This will mail any attachments to the fax number in the subject line of 
the e-mail.  Now that isn't a bullet-proof product - maybe it won't even 
run, but it should demonstrate how simple this really is.  Most peoples' 
FaxDispatch files are going to be more complicated than this.  And this 
will probably be just as customized as a FaxDispatch file, and thus 
there's not much of a point to creating a default "mail-to-fax" script 
for the HylaFAX distributions... it's just too simple to do and too 
often going to need more customizations than actual code.

Most of the work, I suspect, will be involved in learning your your 
MTA/MDA work and getting them to push the mail through to this... but if 
you have faxmail functional already, then just use this as a drop-in 
replacement, if you like.  Command-line parameters get passed along as 
$1, $2, $3, etc.  This should be a walk in the park.

Lee.


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