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From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
Phone: +49-6637-919123
Fax:   +49-6637-919122
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	id PAA16063 for questions@FreeBSD.org; Mon, 9 Sep 1996 15:06:43 +0200
Message-Id: <199609091306.PAA16063@allegro.lemis.de>
Subject: Interfacing with Microsoft fax support?
To: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Questions)
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 15:06:43 +0200 (MET DST)
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I have a customer who wants to send faxes from Word and Excel.
Currently he can do it with something called Microsoft Exchange or
Microsoft Office, but there is no documented way to interface with
UNIX.  In addition, the software is really clever: if it can't send
the fax immediately, it returns it to the sender as mail.

As far as we can gather from the almost non-existent documentation,
the system uses a mail analogy, but it's apparently not SMTP.  I'd
like to find a way to send the faxes to a FreeBSD machine and then
queue and send the messages with Hylafax.  If anybody has experience
with this stuff, could you please tell me:

- What's the transport protocol?  As far as I can see, it's some kind
  of file sharing, but we don't know what.

- What's the format of the (temporary) files that get stored on the
  server?  Can I transform them into something that Hylafax would
  understand (like PostScript or TIFF)?

- Is there any way to stop the server from returning the messages
  immediately if it can't dial?

- Is there any way to send the messages from Word or Excel in
  PostScript format without selecting 'Fax'?  If we could do it as
  regular mail, that would be fine, but all we've been able to do so
  far have been octet streams which appear to contain the original
  application-specific data.

- Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance
Greg