Re: [hylafax-users] mail--> fax

[Lee Howard <faxguy@deanox.com>]

At 11:26 AM 8/14/00 -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Monday, August 14, 2000, at 10:33:48 AM, Lee Howard wrote:
>> An email-to-fax gateway can be quite simply reworked using procmail to
>> avoid mangling sendmail at all and so that the e-mail can be directed at an
>> actual user.  The user doesn't even need to be a dedicated "fax only" user,
>> depending on how you work the recipe.
>
>> If you'd like an example, you can take a look in
>> http://www.deanox.com/HylaFAX
>
>Hmmm... that snags all the necessary addressing out of the body of the
>document, no?  Sometimes that's a feature, sometimes it's a bug.

RelayFax (my Windows client) stuffs all of the faxing info into the message
body and attaches the fax as a TIF image.  But procmail can get the
addressing from either the header or the body or both, and that's all up to
how the recipe's created.

>If the body of the document can always be assumed to contain the
>faxnumber and recipient's name, that's pretty spiffy.

The e-mail generated by the RelayFax client is consistently formated.
I.e., except for version differences, there's no change in the way that the
e-mail looks.  Even the caps are the same always.  So, there's no chance of
messing up the procmail egrep, and it makes it very easy to program for.

>How (or more importantly, *why* :-) would you use that for a
>non-dedicated user?  If you were on a shared, HF equipped machine that
>you didn't have root access on?

Personally, I think a dedicated outbound fax user is less troublesome and
easier to configure, but it's not necessary.  And by the same token, if you
don't have root access to create such a dedicated user, I doubt that you'd
have root access to mangle sendmail.cf to make the fax gateway work that
way, either.  Why use it on a non-dedicated user?  If you don't have root
access (and do have /dev/ttySx access, ha!).

To answer how, though, you'd create an initial recipe in the outbound fax
user's .procmailrc file to filter out the faxes and redirect them to the
faxing .procmailrc (which probably would do well in a subdirectory) via
INCLUDERC.  This way, only the faxes get sent there, and the rest of the
mail gets delivered as usual.

Now, if the system doesn't use procmail or doesn't have procmail installed,
or if the system prohibits such things, then... well, what are the chances
that a non-root user could install and use hylafax sucessfully anyway?  So,
yeah... a dedicated user is the way to go.

Lee Howard

>
>Cheers,
>-- jra
>-- 
>Jay R. Ashworth    



____________________ HylaFAX(tm) Users Mailing List _______________________
 To unsub: mail -s unsubscribe hylafax-users-request@hylafax.org < /dev/null