[PLUG] email that prompts outgoing FAX

[Aaron Burt]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Mike De La Mater wrote:
> Is there a way to get an incoming e-mail to prompt an outgoing FAX?
>
> I have a FAX I want to have sent to someone sho sends an e-mail with
> their FAX number in the subject.

Email to FAX gateway?  Sure.  It's gonna involve HylaFAX and maybe some
Perl.  Hrm, let's see what T.F.W. says...

http://www.hylafax.org/howto/faxing.html#ss5.4

 5.4 Email-To-Fax Configuration
  * faxmail - faxmail is a HylaFAX client program which takes an electronic
    mail message on standard input and converts it to PostScript in a form
    that is suitable for transmission as a facsimile. Read the man page:
    faxmail(1). In order to use faxmail as an email-to-fax gateway,
    typically some degree of "sendmail mangling" must be done. See
    http://www.hylafax.org/howto/clients/sendmail-faxmail-mangling.html and
    http://www.hylafax.org/howto/clients/faxmail-nonrandom-host.html for
    more information.
  * email-to-fax with procmail - If procmail is your mail delivery agent
    (MDA), then you can easily configure it to handle outbound faxes by
    setting up a dedicated user account for faxing out and placing
    appropriate recipes in that user's $HOME/.procmailrc file. Outbound
    faxes are then e-mailed to this user account. This is how the
    above-mentioned RelayFax client works, which already has a simple
    generic email-to-fax capability built-in.

It's a shame more folks don't know about HylaFAX.  Heck, I'd run it
myself, if I had a modem, a land-line and a need to handle FAXes.
Maybe it'll get more popular now that Windows no longer comes with
FAXing.  Just another job for your friendly li'l SOHO Linux box...