email2fax 1.2

email2fax is a bash script that allows you to send a fax through your Asterisk PBX.

email2fax accepts emails with a PDF or a TIFF attachment, and faxes them through Asterisk to a number specified in a subject field of the email.

Here are some key features of "email2fax":

· it expects to find a fax number in a subject field,
· it expects to find one PDF or one TIFF attachment,
· if these conditions are met, it converts an attachment to the right format, and passes it to Asterisk, and instructs it to send it to a specified number.

As mail2fax wasn't really user friendly (it didn't support PDF attachments; TIFF attachments had to be in a special format), I decidet to write my own implementation.

Currently, email2fax depends on AstFax - that means, a processed attachment (which needs to have a right format) is passed to AstFax, which then passes it to Asterisk.

Usage:

- make sure your Asterisk box can receive faxes - Spandsp has to be set up correctly,
- download and extract email2fax package, don't forget about mpack and munpack, if you don't have them in the system (they are in the package)
- compose a sample message - attach a PDF file, and put a fax number in the subject field - save it on a disk as message.eml; copy it to your Asterisk box
- try to send your first fax from the command line:
cat message.eml | sudo -u asterisk email2fax --debug
- if it worked, congratulations, if not, make sure Spandsp is set up correctly (i.e., you are able to receive faxes), consult /var/log/asterisk/faxlog file, connect to asterisk console (sudo -u asterisk asterisk -crvvvvv), etc.
- if everything works, set up a .procmailrc for the asterisk user:

:0fw
| /var/lib/asterisk/m2f/email2fax

and try to send this same email directly to asterisk@yourasteriskbox

What's New in This Release:

· Handling multi-page TIFF files was fixed.
· All *.call files should now have random names.



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