446275 - [wishlist]: send documents from Thunderbird to fax

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Cristian Consonni]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; it; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061015 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.14 (20080505)

I need to send a fax but I don't have any modem or so, just my internet connection (DSL connection). Is there an add-on to send documents to a fax number? (i.e. as attachments)
I've done a Google search but find only fax-through-modem softwares, plus I've read about courier-faxmail, but it seems it doesn't work and there's no documentation (or I didn't find it, at least). 
Thank you in advance for you great job! ... and sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong place.
Ciao

Cristian

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

I have implemented a T-38 interface for my daytime job, So I can answer this question.

Normal faxes work on the voice channel of your phone connection. Your computer has absolutely no access to your phone line, not even if you use a DSL line (it's incorrect to call it a DSL modem). There exists something like FoIP (fax-over-IP), which is indeed a way to use the Internet Protocol for faxes. But it's not suited for use on the internet - the IP protocol is only used to lower the transmission costs, not actually communicating over the Internet. The problem is that it requires a gateway-server on the other side, that interfaces with the real phone system, in order to reach the remote fax machine. And that's where the problem lies : you need to *pay* for it, which probably mean that you need a subscription of some sort. Some is free, but you can't send faxes to any fax number all over the world, often only in a limited area.

An example of such a gateway is the mail-tofax gateway at <http://home.efax.com/s/r/efax-cj2> (which I'm not endorsing, it's the only one I found).