Email to fax provider, any recommendations or suggestions?

The community project

can do that for free, but the delivery is not guaranteed and sometimes they add a coverpage with ads. They also point to other alternatives: On the commercial side, you may consider and the related company .

Enzo

Hmmm... In that case you could try to use real-time fax-over-IP rather than email-to-fax. According to

, Gafachi, an inexpensive Pay-As-You-Go SIP provider ) supports T.38, and you might use a Sipura SPA-2100 with firmware version >= 3.2.X ) to have up to two analog FXS ports to which you might attach fax modems or fax machines.

On the paper it should work, but I never tried it. And at

they say:

PLEASE NOTE: Fax support is offered as a beta feature. It is disabled by default. You are welcome to use it, but please be advised that some equipment may not be interoperable with our network's fax support. Technical assistance to configure your equipment for fax will not be provided.

Enzo

Someone recommended this company to me a while back..

I have not tried them yet.

With a SIP provider, you would need a fax machine or other device to send it across the "line".

,

Why is Skype your fax metric? Skype doesn't (and AFAICT never will) do faxing, so the comparison is meaningless. Scan the documents to PDF and Email them to your recipient, and it'll cost you nothing.

Almost anything looks and is better than efax, including buying a fax machine :-)

$20 a month for a fax number and then you pay for all outbound faxes is insane.

I use MaxEmail which now costs $24 a year and a per minute charge. They have rates to the U.K., but they are not stated in the website.

gets you there, but it looks like your faxaway might be a better deal.

Carl Navarro

I have used Faxaway and can not recommend it for anything beyond a cheap incoming fax number, if that. The system they use seems to be the same antiquated system which was probably there to begin with and they've been too lazy/cheap to update it. It deals with document format conversion very poorly and delivery is suspect at best, I have had CCIT Group 3 Fax standards encoded .tif files rejected by their system. You have to constantly babysit the faxes sent through them to see if they failed by some quirk or not. Their customer service is also complete crap if you have a problem. My advice is to look at other providers besides them if you need reliability.

Note that there's also at least one T.38 software modem.

I contacted Gafachi a couple weeks ago and was told that although this is a "beta feature" they plan to continue offering it.

It requires a few steps but I'm hoping to get t38modem working with my Asterisk host and Gafachi account. That will open a lot of possibilities for me. Unfortunately it looks like some more patching of Asterisk is necessary.

Now, if we also had a patch for at least one of the Asterisk H323 channels this patch then you could run Asterisk and Hylafax with T38modem (by on the same box and terminate T.38 calls.

This bug entry makes me think that it will be awhile until Asterisk can handle T.38.

--kyler