Using an install of the FreePBX Distro running FreePBX 12 and Asterisk 11, I set up a DID to receive and email faxes today. For anyone else that hasn’t figured out how to do this, here is what I did:
I first created a new virtual extension 900. Saved it and reopened it, then I could see the fax fields. I checked “enabled”, put a valid Gmaill address in the Fax Email field, and left the attachment format set to pdf, then saved those changes.
Then I went to inbound routes and created an inbound route for my FAX DID, and routed it to Fax Recipient: 900. Saved that, then under Settings, FAX Configuration I entered an email address for faxes sent by the system, and applied all my changes. This all appeared to be working and when I sent a test fax, FreePBX answered the call, returned the fax tones, and accepted the fax. By watching the CLI I could then see that it had successfully received and emailed the fax, yet the fax never showed up in my email. I don’t know what made me think to check my spam folder, since I’ve received other email sent by the system, but there they were!
Just out of curiosity I viewed the raw message format (basically the text actually received before the e-mail software tries to fix it up) and noticed a couple of odditied. First, the from address was in angle brackets, in other words it look like this:
From: <[email protected]>
Second, the subject line had some weird characters in it, and looked like this (phone number changed):
Subject: =?utf-8?Q?New_fax_from:_"9999999999"_<9999999999>?=
I didn’t see anything else that might cause the message to be flagged as spam - would one of those two things do it? And why the extra stuff in the subject line?
Also, getting back to that Settings, FAX Configuration window: Most of the other options look like they are concerned with sending faxes, not receiving. But if FreePBX supports sending faxes (rather than just receiving them) I can’t seem to figure out how you’d actually go about sending a fax. I only have the need to send a fax once every several months, but it would be nice to be able to do it without having to go someplace where there is a fax machine available, so are there any good instructions for sending a fax from FreePBX, or is that even possible?
I realize that if I were business, there is a lovely commercial fax module available, but this system is only used by myself and a few close friends, mostly as a bridge between older Linksys/Sipura devices and softphones, that don’t have native Google Voice capabilities, and Google Voice using the unsupported module. And I am sure that between all of us we’d probably never send more than a dozen faxes a year, so obviously I’m not prepared to buy the commercial module for this type of system and low level of usage.