elementay fax questions

[Haines Brown <brownh@hartford-hwp.com>]

I remain unclear about some very elementary issues after doing some
online searching. My aim is a simple low cost facility to send and
receive faxes in very low volume. 

I suppose a simple setup would be a fax modem, either an external
modem connected to the serial port or a fax-modem card (generally if
not a win-modem) in a PC slot. The modem can be accessed by
server-client fax software, of which I gather mgetty is pretty
standard.  

For incoming faxes, the fax-modem must obviously discriminate between
analog voice and digital fax so that the phone rings with an incoming
voice message and does not with a fax. Can I assume this capability is now
present in all fax-modems, whether an external modem or an internal
card? 

I assume the hardware hookup for an external fax modem would be:

                              -> DSL adapter 
  RJ11 on wall -> DSL filter |              -> phone
                              -> fax-modem |      
                                            -> computer serial port


-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM