[asterisk-users] asterisk email to fax

[Markus Weiler]

Hi Eric,

This is not really easy. Especially the Mail2Tiff Conversion is tricky 
(lots of different MIME/File formats).
When you have the correct tiff file the rest ist easy. Try to narrow it 
down to an empty Mail Body using (one) PDF attachment.
We used a self written Java app to prepare the files.

Markus


Am 25.06.2015 um 18:09 schrieb Eric Cooper:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 08:15:06AM +0200, tux john wrote:
>> i would like to add email to fax functionality to the system. could someone
>> point me to the right direction to see how please?
> I don't have a general solution, since I haven't needed to send faxes
> recently.  But I did set up my dialplan so that I could test that it
> works.
>
> I used this:
> ----
>      ;; For outgoing faxes
>      FAX_NAME = My Company Name
>      FAX_NUMBER = My Phone Number
>      FAX_FILE = /tmp/fax.tiff
>
>      [services]
>      ...
>      exten => sendfax,1,Verbose(3,Sending fax)
>        same => n,Set(FAXOPT(headerinfo)=${FAX_NAME})
>        same => n,Set(FAXOPT(localstationid)=${FAX_NUMBER})
>        same => n,SendFax(${FAX_FILE})
>        same => n,Verbose(3,Pages: ${FAXOPT(pages)}  Status: ${FAXOPT(status)})
>        same => n,System(rm ${FAX_FILE})
>        same => n,Hangup()
> ----
>
> To "dial" the sendfax extension, I created a call file manually that
> looked like this:
>      Channel: DAHDI/g0/1-800-123-4567
>      Context: services
>      Extension: sendfax
> In an automated system, you'd probably want to use the manager API,
> but you could also generated call files from scripts.  Then I placed
> the fax file in /tmp/fax.tiff and the call file in
> /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing/ and Asterisk sent off the fax.  There
> are some free fax echo numbers out there that are useful when
> debugging.
>
> If I wanted to drive this automatically from email, I would probably
> just use procmail and some scripts.  Ghostscript produces the right
> kind of image file if you use "-sDEVICE=tiffg4".  You'd have to define
> some syntax for specifying the outgoing number and cover page info in
> the email body, and extract the MIME attachment for the document from
> the email.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> --
> Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u
>