Re: [hylafax-users] faxmail and mimetypes, what's the current info?

["Joshua Kinard" <jkinard@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Lee Howard


> You are correct.  An HTML attachment with in-line images, etc., will 
> *not* be imaged as expected with faxmail.

Yeah, I discovered this in a test run, where I used a fancy MS Word cover page in a mail merge application to the fax system via e-mail.  faxmail definitely got the whole mail, but it discarded all the images, as I don't have converters for gif, jpeg, or png setup (though I imagine this itself wouldn't be too difficult).  However, because Outlook munges things a lot, it sent both text and XML...that's something that I don't think any postscript converter, even html2ps, might like.  But I haven't actually tested that..


> You can't.  faxmail doesn't work that way, and it would really require 
> quite an overhaul to get it to working.  Far, far easier would be to 
> simply bypass faxmail altogether and use your own customized mail-to-fax 
> "sendfax wrapper" script.  Such as you can see here:
>
> http://hylafax.sourceforge.net/howto/faxing.php#ss5.4  (look for 
> "sendfax wrapper")
>
> You'd need to decode things and put them in places where html2ps expects 
> them to be for it to be able to produce the inline images as expected.  
> It'll take a little bit of work to get going, but for all real purposes 
> doing that is far easier than trying to change the whole way that 
> faxmail works.

Hmm, rather interesting.  Assuming I wanted to start from one of those scripts, how does one "replace" faxmail?  Configuration directive someplace?  I think I'll tinker with those two provided scripts and see if I can't get something workable up.  It's either that, or cooking up VB Macros in Word to so some tricks with SalsaFax.

> application/octet-stream gets invoked when the mail's Content-Type 
> labels the content as such.  Microsoft Outlook has the bad habit of 
> calling everything binary as such... and everything non-binary as 
> "quoted-printable".

I looked through the source material that came off of a fax after a test page...none of the XML or plain text was referred as any visible mimetype that I could see, but that could've been hidden in the headers.  The attached images that were part of the HTML, however, were all discarded with their mimetypes clearly indicated.  Will I have to look into finding converters for those, or does html2ps handle gif/jpeg/png -> PS conversion?


> faxmail handles multipart messages just fine on its own.  But I don't 
> ink that it's particularly relevant to your search.

How exactly does it handle it?  From the one fax test I did, it looks like it chopped it up into pieces alright, and maybe even piped the whole mess to sendfax, just minus most of the images because they were of a mimetype other than what I have converters for.  That makes me wonder how that referenced python script is supposed to work.  I figured if there was a specific mimetype HTML messages w/ inline images come in as, then I could just route it that way, but the instructions imply this is done through the MTA itself.  And the only thing I have going on there really is the alias of "@fax.domain.com -> /usr/local/bin/mail2fax".  Unless they imply creating a separate alias to handle HTML-formatted messages, like say, "@faxhtml.domain.com -> /usr/local/bin/blah.py".


Thanks for the info!,

--Josh


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