Is fax receive / retrieving saved faxes planned? [Suggestions included.]

Asked by floid

Since I see faxing is now possible, I'm just curious whether any 'receive to PC' / 'retrieve saved faxes' functionality is planned.

For some specifics on workflow/what would be desired, I'm pushing paper at a law office running Ubuntu with a LaserJet 3030 and would personally like to:
* Have received faxes both print and automatically be archived digitally (mentioned because some people might not anticipate desiring both at once)
* [especially in lieu of the above], be able to examine the "Reprint Last" memory without reprinting 100+ pages of unneeded documents

For the 'save to PC' feature, copying to an inbox is fine, the ability to sort by claimed transmitter or Caller ID would be cute but could be encoded in the filenames and left to local scripts. This seems like it could be handled by either a simple daemon or the session helper-app approach (which would allow whoever's logged in at the machine to receive 'their' faxes), but it would be nice if the helper app can have an option to daemonize and receive faxes without an X display (for those of us who'd rather have a 'faxuser' dumping everything into one location.

...
In fact, if the time comes that you go ahead and write a receive GUI that sorts by fax ID, obvious cases to consider are:
* Expiring rules: Projects (and legal cases) end; it'd be cool to be able to add a 'save to destination' rule to last 6 months with a handy 'refresh' button.
* View by date: At the same time, nobody wants to miss something that just came in because it was properly sorted. Hardlinks seem to be vogue again, and make sense for this -- Keep everything in the chronological 'Inbox,' make a hardlink if the rule's destination is local, and fall back to copying if the hardlink creation fails because it's on another mount. Voila!

...
And as y'all engineer future devices, at least on the "low end," it seems like the straightforward approach would be to allow the printer, through a configuration option, to expose a Mass Storage class endpoint (or on networked devices, a NFS or SAMBA share) with a read-only filesystem exposing the data. While standards (like DCIM?) would probably work here, even exposing whatever raw ".3g" format is used would meet the problem halfway.
...

Also, glad to see you're open for business on Launchpad -- if nothing else, it makes asking small questions like this easier than bothering a mailing list.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said :
#1

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said :
#2

reopening

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Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said :
#3

I haven't forgotten about this--I'm working on getting some information for you regarding this.

Thanks!

A

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Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said :
#4

Floid,

We are looking at adding this feature in the future, although I can't promise if/when we will--it is on our todo list.

Sorry for the delay and any inconvenience.

Thanks for your suggestions and support of HPLIP!

Aaron

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Alain Goldberg (alain-goldberg) said :
#5

Hello,
Any news ?
I really need this feature.

I would like also the possibility to push the fax to email.
If this too much to ask, then let me type in the setup the command or script to be run on the received document, like:
assuming %f is the file of the received fax, and %n the caller-id of the sender

echo "Fax from %n attached" > mail -s "New Fax from %n" -a %f <email address hidden>

Actually, with this method I can do everything including storing it in a database.
Thanks.

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yehielb (yehielb) said :
#6

I don't know if someone is still looking for this, but is there a receive fax solution for Linux?
Thanks.

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Suma Byrappa (suma-byrappa) said :
#7

Hello,

At present, there is no desktop software support for receiving or routing incoming fax. However if the device supports "fax to email" or similar features, you can configure settings on the printer panel to get those functionalities working.

Regards,
Suma

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yehielb (yehielb) said :
#8

Suma, thank you for your quick reply
Is there any plan for such a software?

Thanks,
Yehiel

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Suma Byrappa (suma-byrappa) said :
#9

It is in the wish-list. But as of now, it is not planned for any near term releases.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask floid for more information if necessary.

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