Re: email-fax gateway - need suggestions
On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 09:36:05PM -0500, Neal Lippman wrote:
> I was hoping some folks here could give me some suggestions on setting
> up an email to fax gateway.
>
> My project is basically to provide a mechanism so someone can email to a
> an address in my office (eg "fax@office.com") and have that email
> automatically faxed out. This idea is to eliminate the manpower
> requirement for faxing out reports, which is overwhelming our staff who
> presently have to print the email and manually fax each report,
> sometimes to multiple recipients.
>
> I am aware that this problem has been addressed in various ways using
> efax or hylafax, but my requirements are a bit unique compared to the
> solutions I've seen:
>
> 1. Most commonly, the document that needs to be faxed will be an MS Word
> document, send as an attachment to the email message. As a result,
> simply trying to fax the email body itself won't work.
Uh huh.
>
> 2. The people generating the email that needs to be faxed will generally
> know the name of a person (or people) to recieve the fax, but not their
> fax numbers. We will have an LDAP directory online which will contain
> fax numbers, so the handler needs to look up the recipient(s) and
> translate names to fax numbers automatically.
Sounds fair...
>
> 3. The sender should get back an email acknowledgement so he knows if
> the fax went through or not.
Should be possible to do this. If there's multiple recipients, and it
doesn't get through to some of them, how will this look on the report?
>
> 4. After the fax is sent, the file itself (word document) needs to be
> saved on our fileserver for later reference as well.
Yep...
>
> Our present email implementation uses cyrus-imapd as a mail store. Our
> email is received at an external pop3 server. We use fetchmail running
> as a daemon to periodically retrieve email for all accounts and forward
> the email to cyrus (via an lmtp connection).
>
> I was therefore thinking of the following solution:
> 1. Write a demon that listens for lmtp connections from fetchmail which
> will forward fax related emails to this demon via lmtp (I am in the
> process of writing something similar to handle emails and forward them
> to the printer automatically, so I can reuse this code anyway).
>
> 2. The demon can process the email body based on mime-time. For straight
> text, should assume a first line of the format
> "FAX:<recipient>[,recipient...]>". For MSWord attachments, the process
> is more complicated: The filename will consist of the local patch to
> store the file, followed by a list of recipients. Via this mechanism,
> the demon knows both where to store the file on the file server and to
> whom the file should be faxed.
Why not use the email subject as the recipient list? Might make the
parsing a bit easier.
>
> 3. Using wv, the file is converted from MS Word to postscript, and can
> then be fed into efax for transmission. The exit status of efax
> indicates whether the fax went through, which can be emailed back to the
> sender.
Haven't come across wv, so don't know how good a conversion job it does.
Another possibility might be to set up a network printer that when you
print a Word document to it, saves the postscript file somewhere, or
emails it back to the user. The user then attaches that file to the
"fax email".
>
> I would appreciate anyone who knows of a better / simpler solution, or
> comments on what I have proposed I would very much appreciate it.
Sounds OK to me, still a bit of work to implement though :)
>
> nl
>
> PS: I am aware that there isn't any security in the above system, and I
> recognize the opening this gives for someone to use my fax as a
> forwarding station. I haven't yet decided how to handle security in a
> meaningful way, but I'm also open to suggestions on this score.
I guess examine the email headers, and work out if the request
originated within your network, a bit like a firewall might. It might
be nice to have some sort of audit trail with who faxed what, when they
faxed it, and how many pages it was, too. You could even send a
confirmation email back to the email address to prevent address spoofing.
Anyway, good luck with it!
- Chris
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