Need email to fax gateway

[esc]

I want to implement an email to fax gateway for one of our customers, a Vienniese Heurigenschenke (www.zumweihrauch.at), who has no computer (yes this is possible) and no internet access.

It should work as follows: a visitor of his web site wants to do an online-order for the restaurant and fills out an online form that transfers the data to a dedicated mailbox. I will set up an cron-job on our local development server (Linux) that reads out the email periodically, put an ISDN fax card into the server and plug it into the phone jack. So the hardware for the gateway is set up.

As I have no experience with fax software on Linux I need some recommendation and some hints for the further proceeding. Has anybody reading this done an email to fax gateway on a Linux box and/or can give me advice?

Erich
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[edited one (known) typo]

[Arthur]

I have no experience with this, but take a look at Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=fax), there are some programs there that seem to be able to do what you want.

Grüße,
Arthur

[esc]

Hoi en goeiedag Arthur! Thank you for the link. Hylafax (www.hylafax.org) will do it. It’s a little bit a jumbo but comes with good documentation. I’ll give it a try.

Salut,
Erich

[Terra]

If you need something not as extensive, take a look at 'mgetty-sendfax' and 'mgetty-viewfax'... 'efax' is another alternative...

I've not used them, but they popped up when I was mucking around my rpm store...

--
Terra
sysAdmin
FutureQuest

[esc]

Thank you Terra! I’ll check these components too, as the binaries are on my SuSE CDs. I will send FQ a fax if I get this working and if my customer really wants to pay for the gateway. All commercial fax services I found are not too cheap (about $15 setup plus $7 per month and $1 per fax) and the few free services have severe restrictions (only one fax per day and per IP, one has to use their form, or they do not send to Austria, etc.). As this probably will take me several hours to setup and test, I will definitely charge above the fees I have to pay for the faxes myself to the phone company.

Erich

[jw21604]

I thought I'd throw this out incase it might help you
http://www.savetz.com/fax/

jw

[esc]

Thank you jw! There is a lot of interesting material in this FAQ and a pointer to the Unet newsgroup alt.fax. One of the commercial services mentioned (fax.co.uk) is sending for about $0.17 per minute with about 40 minutes minimum per month to whole Europe. I don't think that I can beat this price in a reasonable way. ~#

Erich