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I read somewhere that with a regular SOHO office fax machine you can configure the line port directly to connect to a fax modem. There was some script someone configured using mgetty in direct mode that allowed you to receive faxes without making a call. Google it and you will find ;)
You may have to hack it around a little to allow hylafax to detect the number. If and when the voice mode answering support (bug 859) is included you could configure for the fax machine to listen for the DTMF id tones dialed by the fax machine as a kind of caller id (it's used this way in some countries!!) then the following fax tone hylafax will answer the call process it as per external fax calls. Once recieved Hylafax can the process the fax via VOIP/ (t38 in the future) / IAX / email by using a custom faxrecvd script.
You then configure the hylafax to email the incoming fax based on the dialrules and whola you have your fax-machine to email fax gateway (like efax or whatever you want to use).
Is anyone aware of a SOHO multifunction printer, fax, copier, scanner that seamlessly interoperates with a fax gateway such as http://www.hylafax.org/content/Email_to_Fax_Gateway or asterfax http://asterfax.sourceforge.net/index.php?
It needs to be absolutely transparent to the end user such that they walk up, put in their paper document, enter the fax telephone #, hit fax send and walk away. The multifunction hardware would then know to send an email to EmailToFaxGateway@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with a subject line containing the outgoing fax #. For instance, if the user enters 4025551234 on the touchpad, the hardware emails a TIFF or PDF to EmailToFaxGateway@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with a subject line of "4025551234". The email-to-fax gateway service on the HylaFax server would then take the email and send it over POTS to 4025551234.
Why? Because in an all VOiP office, moving a fax machine and POTS analog line is expensive and a pain. Dedicated analog POTS lines are expensive. Sending very long documents or hi-res documents would be facilitated because they would get "scanned" and sent to the fax server with certainty. The end user could requeue the job in HylaFax if it failed or timed out or the phone # was wrong. It would double as a networkable scanner. Home users would be able to fax directly from their home machine to jfax.com or efax.com (Credentialing may be a little complex however).
Multifunction machines similar to the following do not have this seamless capability. It would seem easy to add this as a layer in the firmware for outgoing faxes.
HPLJ 3390. http://www.brother.com.au/Products/MFC_productoverview.asp?ProductID=220&SubCategoryID=2
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