Fax questions/changes?

**Brian** · 08-26-2008 04:10 PM

I see some new fax file types have been added - how about JPG? Any chance?

**Brian** · 08-26-2008 04:14 PM

Hmm...the email confirmation area seems to have disappeared too. What's up with that?

**VOIPoTim** · 08-26-2008 04:44 PM

Originally Posted by Brian

Hmm...the email confirmation area seems to have disappeared too. What's up with that?

There were so many complaints with the Alpha system for the in-house version that we pulled it and reverted back to the outsourced version for the time being.

We're reviewing some more options, but have to be very careful how we approach it in order to avoid patent issues.

We're learning towards moving that entire fax service to a hardware based setup vs using software. That way 99% of the patent issues are resolved with just that since most hardware has that covered.

**Brian** · 08-26-2008 06:33 PM

Perfectly fine with me, but I would think some kind of confirmation or failure message would be essential to the final roll-out.

**VOIPoTim** · 08-26-2008 07:32 PM

Originally Posted by Brian

Perfectly fine with me, but I would think some kind of confirmation or failure message would be essential to the final roll-out.

Yeah I agree. That's the main reason the "Send Fax" feature has never been officially offered. Originally the fax service was inbound only mainly because of issues like this. We wanted to try to do sending as well, but it's very difficult to do reliably without getting into some touchy patent issues which could potentially cause problems later.

It won't be offered in the public release for the time being.

**usa2k** · 08-26-2008 08:20 PM

So you would use Hylafax and a fax modem pool to send faxes?

**VOIPoTim** · 08-26-2008 08:58 PM

Originally Posted by usa2k

So you would use Hylafax and a fax modem pool to send faxes?

Well we tried something similar, but it didn't work too well.

What we're actually looking at moving to are things similar to these:

http://www.faxback.com/Products/serv...der/index.aspx

http://tools.cisco.com/support/downl...dfid=279609050

http://www.faxcore.com/product.asp

I'm just not feeling good about any open source solutions for faxing because the patents on it are very tight and the players are very aggressive in pursuing patent claims (in particular J2 Communications who files dozens of suits every month like clockwork).

**N9MD** · 08-28-2008 09:38 PM

Interesting outbound faxing results.

I faxed a 20+ page Word (.doc) document to my k7.net AC206 fax DID# and the same Word (.doc) document to my FreeDigits AC712 fax DID#. Both these DID#s are delivered to my email with the faxed document as an atachment.

The .doc file sent to k7.net arrived successfully as a PDF file.
The .doc file sent to FD arrived successfully as a TIFF file.

Two observations

(1) The header at the top of each page in both the PDF & the TIFF files shows "From Fax Service 8883690301 Thu Aug 28 19:53:59 2008 MST Page # of ##". Is there a way to eventually replace the 888# in the header with our VOIPo DID?

(2) The header puts at least two line feeds on each page, thereby putting the last line or two of some of the pages onto the top of the next page --- and in some cases, causing a blank page to be included. This may not be rectifiable ... but you might want to see if the header line feeds can be supressed.

Cliff

**quattrohead** · 08-29-2008 08:03 AM

Faxing is looking like a whole lot of hastle for something that is not core business to you at this time. Seems it might be better to optimize your system to pass regular fax better and document methods for making it work.

I rolled out MyFax to one of my customers and so far it seems OK.