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Currently you send faxes by web form submission and receive them by email. I would like to have the ability of sending faxes by email. This would be more uniform instead of using a browser to send and an email client to receive, you could use an email client for both.
Many of the online e-faxing services provide this ability:
http://www.faxcompare.com/
Submitted by eeman on Wed, 08/18/2010
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then get off your butt and start programming ;-)
There is no chance in hell thirdlane is going to be responsible for programming and securing a mail server (of which there are 4 different ones depending on distro).. obviously you have absolutely no clue how much of a task that is or you wouldn't suggest it. Its one thing to make sendmail send messages, its an entirely different task to set up a publicly listening mail server. Most users expect major hand holding for simple asterisk features and cry like a baby when they have to set up their own chan_dahdi. they could NEVER mannually set up Exim/Sendmail/Qmail/Postfix, correctly install it, set up the FQDNs, the A records, the PTR records, SVR records, trusted sources. Then there's the and writing/installing of mailer agent scripts to detach attachments, convert them, process errors from stupid users not to mention the spam getting passed to sendfax by accident resulting in crashes, then pass it along to dialplan.
After you manage to get it running there is the daily task of keeping yourself unbanned, unspammed, and stopping the damn load from screwing up your asterisk process. After a month or so your public mail server is cannon fodder for spam attacks and they WILL discover your fax email adresses. Thats when the fun really starts with the crashing. Then after you get passed all those obstacles you'll realize that this 1 script can be used by anyone so you have no way of separating accounts for billing. They all appear to come from the exact same user regardless who sent the 90 page fax internationally to tokyo, at 20 cents per minute.
And lastly, if you already have it in email form, why are you such a moron you want to FAX it??? Email the goddamn thing to the recipient, you already have the damn email application open.
this is a horrible idea for an MTE box. Its stupid to load up these other services on your pbx that can seriously impact voice services.
If you want such a feature you should build it and install it on a separate box. Maybe you can sell it to other people too stupid to realizing that emailing an attachment direcly is easier and looks better than emailing it to a fax gateway.