[Asterisk-Users] Faxing Suggestions

[Rich Adamson]

> SECOND!
> 
> I was faced with either trying to get spanDSP to work on a SIP trunk
> with an old Sharp fax machine (or a fax modem), or signing up with
> Trustfax.  I'm keeping all my documents in PDF anyway, so this seemed
> like a good option.  Cost-wise, they're definitely ahead for me -- a
> dedicated DID would cost me $2/month at best.  While I first thought
> their UI was a bit awkward, I've recently come to love it as I had to
> send and receive aout 160 pages in one week.  It's nice to be able to
> keep incoming and outgoing faxes online for re-use.
> 
> Of all the options out there, this is the least expensive for us
> low-volume users.
> 
> Lastly, even though I haven't spent more than $30 there so far, two
> calls to tech support were answered promptly and courteously.  One was
> an issue on their side which was fixed within an hour, the other was
> related to a problem on my network.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > We are using www.trustfax.com ($9.95/yr for an 800 number plus
> > $0.10 per page. Much less expensive then doing anything on 
> > your own when one considers total cost of toner, paper, hardware, 
> > multi-line hunt, technical support, junk faxes, etc, etc.)
> > 
> > There are several others as well.

Exactly the same interactions that I've had with them. Nothing but
excellent service.

I've given up totally on trying to make spandsp work with the TDM04b
card for now. I'm not even sure I'd try that approach again even
when the TDM card is fixed. The Trustfax.com approach is soooo much
less support intensive for low volume faxing; its almost a no-brainer.

The only downside that I've observed (to date) is that sending a
Word document to their automated outbound fax interface has a small
conversion problem where it doesn't maintain the same margins and
text layout. A well-formated document might look completely 
different when you get the pdf fax image. But, for us that's a very
minor issue since 95% of our faxes are inbound. (We still maintain
an old analog fax machine for some outbound faxes, but it hasn't
been used in weeks.)

FWIW, they had never heard of asterisk before; they are now looking
into using it for their voice switch. :)

Rich