fax

fax

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Deliver with a fax-sending program

V8.8 and above

The fax delivery agent is used to deliver mail to a fax-sending program. If you define this delivery agent with:

 MAILER(`fax') 

any address that ends in .fax is automatically sent to that delivery agent. Thus, to fax mail to a user on the local machine, you might do the following:

 To: [e-mail] 

This will cause the message to be sent to the faxmail program for delivery to the number 555-4321. ^[5] The faxmail program will parse the message for a recipient, and for fax-tuning parameters passed in header lines that begin with x-fax- . It will format and send the result to the hfaxd daemon, which actually communicates with fax modems.

^[5] Note that in the United States, numbers that begin with 555 (other than 555-1212) are guaranteed to be non-existent or benign . That is why 555 numbers are often used in U.S.-produced movies and television programs (and in examples in books such as this).

Note that hfaxd and the modems need not exist on the local machine. If you have a central fax server, you can set up all the client machines by defining the FAX_RELAY mc configuration macro to point at that machine:

 define(`FAX_RELAY', `fax.your.domain') 

With this definition, any mail addressed to an address ending in .fax will be forwarded to fax.your.domain for sending as a fax. Obviously, you will need to have fax-sending software and fax modems installed on that machine.

Note that you should use either MAILER('fax') or FAX_RELAY not both. If you declare both, the MAILER('fax') will supersede the FAX_RELAY , and all fax mail will be delivered locally.

Another way to handle faxes is to set up aliases for each user that can receive faxes:

 userA+fax: "/usr/local/bin/faxmail -d userA@5551234" userB+fax: "/usr/local/bin/faxmail -d userB@5556789" 

The defaults for the fax delivery agent are listed in Table 20-6. The mc configuration macros at the left can be used to modify or replace those defaults.

Table 20-6. Macros to modify the fax delivery agent

Macro		Default
FAX_MAILER_ARGS	See this section	A=faxmail -d $u@$h $f
none	See this section	F=DFMhu
FAX_MAILER_PATH	See this section	P=/usr/local/bin/faxmail
FAX_MAILER_MAX	See this section	M=100000
none	R=	R=24
none	S=	S=14
none	T=	T=X-Phone/X-FAX/X-Unix
FAX_MAILER_QGRP	Q=	no Q= default

The faxmail program, the hfaxd daemon, and all the other supporting software you need to email faxes is available from ftp://ftp. hylafax .org/.

Also, a number of commercial products are available that allow users to email faxes. They are easily found by searching on the Web.