FOOD FOR THOUGHT DiD to Email Faxing using IncredibleFAX

[Rob Daniel]

Perhaps I am making it more complicated than it is. I am attempting to use the Incredible PBX 13.13 Enchilada OVA.
This system is intended to be strictly for FAX. I need to take a series of dedicated DiD numbers, when a fax comes in from a DiD it will have a corresponding email address that the server would send the fax to. This would be for 6 DiD lines and 6 emails.
I am fairly versed in Asterisk and Linux.
As I understand it, the default install of IncrediblePBX doesn't support the detection of faxes, which is absolutely fine.
Even if it is pointing a DiD to a specific virtual modem and that modem sends all inbound faxes to an email address, as long as I can use multiple different email addresses, it would work for my purposes.

I attempted to change the configuration files for Hylafax to point to proper email addresses without any success.

Is there any way to do this? It seems like it should be such a common function that people would want, I can not seem to find information on how to make this happen.

 

[dicko]

One possiblity is to use t38modems direct to your DID provider (preferably T38 capable) and just use hylafax+ to map inbound calls by $CALLID4 to email addresses.


Something like this in FaxDispatch:

case "$CALLID4" in
8001112222)
SENDTO="joeschmoe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
;;
8005551111)
SENDTO="foo@xxxxxxx"
;;
*)
SENDTO="baz@xxxxxxxxxxxx"
;;
esac



No PBX then needed, If you go that route I suggest you use debian not redhat (it's a t38modem thing ).

There are many email2fax recipes for hylafax+ out there for sending faxes over the PSTN if you need it.

 

[Rob Daniel]

One possiblity is to use t38modems direct to your DID provider (preferably T38 capable) and just use hylafax+ to map inbound calls by $CALLID4 to email addresses.


Something like this in FaxDispatch:

case "$CALLID4" in
8001112222)
SENDTO="joeschmoe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
;;
8005551111)
SENDTO="foo@xxxxxxx"
;;
*)
SENDTO="baz@xxxxxxxxxxxx"
;;
esac



No PBX then needed, If you go that route I suggest you use debian not redhat (it's a t38modem thing ).

There are many email2fax recipes for hylafax+ out there for sending faxes over the PSTN if you need it.

First, thank you for the reply. I agree no PBX needed, I was just thinking if there is a distro out there (and I am familiar with it) why not use that as a jumping point to get FAX rolling quickly. I am most likely headed in the direction of making my own hylafax+ server.

 

[dicko]

A GUI with built in fax server and T38 at

https://www.fusionpbx.com/

 

[Rob Daniel]

A GUI with built in fax server and T38 at

https://www.fusionpbx.com/

looks like it is worth giving it a shot, thank you once again!

 

[dicko]

Shouldn't take you more than an hour to get it up and running, configuring a gateway (I suggest flowroute for starters), adding destinations( for your DID's) adding users and configuring the mapping of inbound faxes from the destintions to the users are then pretty intuitive. emailing by default uses a builtin phpclient so it might or might not work for you. I add postfix and so set it up for fusionpbx , also a little RTFM. but fusionpbx user participation is kept quite "close to the chest" so

http://www.pbxforums.com/

is an unofficial, frowned on but good source of help on pretty well all things you might need to tweak. sending a fax is there but limited to the gui, adding an email2fax solution again is likely going to need hylafax.

Probably the nicest thing about freeswitch is that it is so very easy to only allow calls to your fully qualified domain name, all the knuckle-dragger stuff on 5060 just gets sent to the bit-bucket, 5080 by default is trusted, you might want to change that as the knuckle-draggers are actually controlled by very clever Russian/Chinese/Name_your_country criminals who have also RTFM's

In FusionPBX, add a FQDN domain, add admin users to it so you are not locked out , delete the default numerical ip domain and make sure you fully understand how to use DNS's SRV and A records (yes the SRV's are very useful if you need HA)

 

[wardmundy]

And, of course, Incredible PBX with Incredible Fax can already take advantage of the dozens of available HylaFax clients.

 

[dicko]

I agree but the lack of t38 support is disappointing though in incrediblefax

Chances are if you use any of those clients properly (if they still actually work, most don't or are long gone, Windoze being the least supported) as individual users, not a generic admin user you should change,

/var/www/html/fax/includes/config.php

and edit faxadduser -c or avantfax with hylafax+ breaks after adding a user in the GUI, the new user needs to be at the bottom of /var/spool/hylafax/etc/hosts.hfaxd, well at least below 127.0.0.1

if you want all the advantages of everything fax like then perhaps this will help:-

https://www.gofaxip-project.org/

no iaxmodems needed , fax over g711 is still supported though if you can't use t38.

So , to surmise , if you want a fax server, then for robustness you need hylafax to resend failed faxes partially by preference, If you need email 2fax, then again hylafax, If you don't or can't use t38 then your success rate will drop significantly depending on your carrier's ability and your networks ability to almost never drop a packet, not likely there ;-) so in effect FreePBX/Asterisk is really quite lame, freeswitch has way better fax handling but hylafax is the key to either being just better , it can eat any openoffice or microsoft documents in an email with a little work a very simple postfix valias can protect you from abuse . . . .

JM2CWAE but I am very happy with my +99% success rate now (just t38modem and hylafax here) true, no GUI .