Here is our manual page for the email to fax gateway. Steven Misrack University of California, San Diego, Office of Network Operations smisrack@ucsd.edu +1 (619) 534-7485 (voice) +1 (619) 534-1746 (fax) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FAXMAIL(L) Programmer's Reference Manual FAXMAIL(L) NAME faxmail - How to send electronic mail to a FAX machine DESCRIPTION You can now send electronic mail to FAX machines. The mail address for doing so is "name@fax", where "name" is the name of the recipient. Include the telephone number in square brackets in the Subject line of the message. Note that the name cannot contain spaces; use underscores, periods, or dashes instead. The telephone number must be exactly what you would dial from a campus telephone to reach the same number. The tele- phone used to make the call will not make off-campus calls, even local ones, without an Ericsson ID number. You must include your Ericsson ID number for all off-campus calls rather than only for long distance calls. [nnnnn] FAX machine is on-campus. Nnnnn is the five digit campus extension; e.g., 54321 [*6*1iiiii#8nnnnnnn] FAX machine is in the local dialing area. Iiiii is your five digit Ericsson ID number and nnnnnnn is the seven digit telephone number; e.g., *6*112345#82891212 [*6*1iiiii#8aaannnnnnn] FAX machine can only be reached with a long distance call. Iiiii is your five digit Ericsson ID number, aaa is the area code, and nnnnnnn is the seven digit tele- phone number; e.g., *6*112345#89005551212 ID NUMBER VISIBILITY mail John_Q_Adams@fax Subject: Urgent Fax message [*6*112345#88531212] The 'phony' address "full_name@fax" will get the mail to the computer that handles FAX messages. That computer will take the number from the "Subject:" line and send the message. The phone number will not appear in the outbound mail log files. The dialing authorization code (between the *6*1 and #8) will be elided from the subject line. The name will appear in the header of the fax at the receiving location and should help in getting your message to the right person. Only a single telephone number may be given on the "Subject:" line. NOTES The equipment that sends the FAX message only processes queued messages at 10 minutes intervals, so there may be some small time before your message is received. Messages are limited to about 1,000 lines of text. Only plain text is supported; images won't go. This service is an experiment by Network Operations. It is free (except for the cost of the telephone call, which is charged to your dialing authorization number by the campus phone system), and NetOp is not funded to support it. Therefore service is not guaranteed. BUGS The software that does the conversion and fax sending is a commercial PC-based product and does not have very good error recovery. It will cope with a BUSY signal from the destination by retrying delivery later, but nearly any other delivery problem will result in "Communication failure" and the message being returned to you. If you get one of these, recheck that the number you have specified is a valid FAX number and that the authorization code is good. This equipment often fails when sending to recipients whose FAX machine shares a line with a voice answering machine or modem.