Email2Fax Script

partgenius · July 12, 2021, 7:08pm

Faxing over asterisk works super awesome now. Inbound/Outbound/Using ATAs etc.
My issue is still lack of a missing Email 2 Fax Script. IE [email protected]

I could explore Hyla/Fax and Avant Fax. And Use their script from 10 years ago. Figuring out bugs, but I still don’t like Avant/Hyla and would prefer to just use asterisk.

VoipInnovations does have mail2fax albeit in a hard to use format and they are using some sort of mail2fax script in the background. I would assume they would be using an asterisk based script. So this can be done by sangoma but has never been made available as an option.

I’ve done this with T38FaxVOIP as well as FusionPBX but not in the format I wanted it to be in.
IE [email protected] I’ve always had to put something in the subject line to identify where I want to send the call.

dicko · July 12, 2021, 7:16pm

Because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, for +5years a simple hylafax+ has worked flawlessly about 600 times a day with over 6000 pages to over 60 recipients, the error rate is less than 1% and hylafax will arrange to recouple redials with ongoing faxes both in and out producing one multi-paged document (occasionally multi broken) (I don’t believe the FreePBX system can get close to that)

The Fax/email solution in FreePBX is commercial so implicitly ‘closed source’ as such you can but address your frustrations to them alone.

sorvani · July 12, 2021, 8:48pm

Yes, it can be painstaking made to work, and is known to be solid for those people that do go through the effort.

Hylafax is not simple and is basically a zombie at this point.

sorvani · July 12, 2021, 8:53pm

You can thank a diligent patent holder for keeping that locked down.

dicko · July 12, 2021, 9:00pm

hylafax+ is not Hylafax

https://hylafax.sourceforge.io/

billsimon · July 12, 2021, 9:06pm

I wrote a simple POC a few years ago. Just updated it to mark it GPLv3 so take it and improve on it.

github.com

billsimon/asterisk-fetch-n-fax/blob/master/faxmail.php

<?php
/* License: GPLv3 */
/* Install on the system: gs (ghostscript package), mail, php5-imap library */

require_once('Mail/mimeDecode.php');

/* Connect to Gmail, or configure for any other IMAP server. For Gmail, don't forget to 
allow less secure apps or generate an app-specific password. */

$hostname = '{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX';
$username = '[email protected]';
$password = 'gmailpassword';

$inbox = imap_open($hostname,$username,$password) or die('Cannot connect to mail server: ' . imap_last_error());

/* Grab unread emails. Change UNSEEN to ALL if you want to get everything. Be sure to enable the delete and
   purge functions below or else you will send the same faxes over and over. */
$emails = imap_search($inbox,'UNSEEN');

/* if emails are returned, cycle through each... */

This file has been truncated. show original

If you want to get the destination number from the To header instead of the Subject header, it’s pretty easy to see how to do that in the script.

dicko · July 12, 2021, 9:11pm

Seventeen years later and still worth a read

https://hylafax.sourceforge.io/howto/faxing.php#ss5.4

partgenius · July 12, 2021, 10:05pm

Thanks bill. I think this is exactly what I was looking for. Its been a long while since Ive posted here or helped answer questions but it was much better community response than normal. Thanks guys. @dicko too. I know hylafax…if it works it works…right. I rarely have any fax issues. Error wise. The goal here is carriers and no T38 on your carrier trunks. Resending partial failed faxes is something Ive only seen one other software be able to do but our customers would not be interested in the feature. We can normally get through 50 page faxes just fine. If something 80+ is failing thats on them. Split it up.

system · July 19, 2021, 10:05pm

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