Hack 63. Fax from Your BlackBerry

If you have access to an email-to-fax gateway, you can send your messages to the nearest fax machine in effect, "printing" an email from your device.

Suppose you're at a client site and just received a lengthy email on your BlackBerry. You would like to have a hardcopy of the important message, but you aren't able to print from your BlackBerry. The client has several fax machines that are at your disposal, but you can't fax from a BlackBerry or can you?

There are publicly available services that allow you to email to a fax machine. A lot of companies set up their own email-to-fax gateway services using software such as Right Fax. If you have access to such a gateway, just find the phone number of the closest fax machine and send the message by using your fax addressing scheme. Most email-to-fax gateways have an addressing scheme that is not easy to remember. These days with email as ubiquitous as it is, most people don't use outbound fax gateways frequently enough to be able to remember how to form the address when sending a fax. There is a simple program from http://www.software-for-blackberry.com that you can configure to remember the fax addressing scheme for your fax service so when you want to send a fax, you can simply access an option on the trackwheel menu and choose a recipient that has a fax number from your address book.

6.5.1. Fax the Hard Way

Here's how most fax gateways work. When you want to send a fax via email, you take the recipient's fax number and plug it into an email address that tells the fax server what number to send the email to. For example, if you'd like to send a fax to [phone], the address might be similar to:

 /fax=[e-mail] 

This scheme will vary depending on which fax gateway you use.

Some fax gateways allow you to customize certain aspects of the fax using additional parameters in the address. Other parameters might include the display name or company name of the recipient for the cover sheet, a custom display name for the sender, or whether to include a fax cover sheet or not. After adding these options to the fax, the email address might become something like:

 /fax=9195555555/com=Company_Name/from=[e-mail] 

As you can imagine, it can be a challenge to even remember the scheme at all, and if you do remember it, it can be a bear typing the address in on the BlackBerry's miniature keyboard.

6.5.2. Fax the Easy Way

A small program called Mail2Fax makes the difficult parts of sending a fax simple. You can download a copy of the program from Handango for $12.95. There is no over-the-air install, so you have to install it using Desktop Manager and Application Loader.

Once installed, you access the configuration from the Home screen. The settings are shown in Figure 6-13. It includes preconfigured options for two popular fax gateways: http://www.efax.com and http://www.faxaway.com. You can also configure a custom addressing scheme. Any text you enter in the Prefix field will become the start of the address, which is immediately followed by the fax number. Text in the Suffix field goes right after the fax number. For example, if your addressing scheme is /fax=[e-mail], the Prefix would be /fax= and the suffix would be @fax.server.com.

Figure 6-13. Configuring the fax gateway addressing scheme

Once you configure and save the settings, you can go to your Messages program and select the message you'd like to fax. In the trackwheel menu for any message, you'll see a Mail2Fax option, as shown in Figure 6-14.

Figure 6-14. The Mail2Fax option on the trackwheel menu

Once you choose the Mail2Fax option, you are presented with a list of users from your address book, but only users that have a fax number defined. Choose the recipient or type a new fax number to use just for this fax. Mail2Fax automatically creates the appropriate email address using the rules you defined in the Mail2Fax settings and forwards the selected email message to the address. After the forwarded message is queued, you are immediately returned to the original selected mail message. This is sort of a "poor man's printer" that comes in quite handy given the right situation.