Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: "John R. Levine" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Faxnet Info Request Message-ID: <2855@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 12 Jan 90 04:36:44 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: Segue Software, Cambridge MA Lines: 32 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 25, message 5 of 10 In article <2796@accuvax.nwu.edu> you write: >But what if I am on a PC and I want to send my data directly from my PC to >a Faxnet machine so that certain copies will be sent via Fax but some will be >sent via e-mail so that the destination user will receive the letter >in computer readable format. All of the major E-Mail services such as MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, and Compuserve do this already. Fax addresses typically look like email addresses to a pseudo-system named fax or something like it. To get data from your PC to the E-Mail system you can use something like Lotus Express which uses a proprietary protocol on top of X.PC to talk to MCI Mail or UUPC, a free PC implementation of uucp, which should be adequate to talk to AT&T Mail. >What of the reverse? Someone feeding in a typed letter into a FAX and >the FAXnet machine sending it to some people via straight FAX and >others via e-mail. Is that posssible? Not really. Current OCR technology, certainly current low-cost OCR technology, has a high error rate and I doubt anyone would be happy with an OCR interpretation of a document scanned in via a Fax machine. What is possible now is to receive faxes on your PC and treat the image as a graphic email message. One particularly clever implementation allows you to attach the fax card to a DID trunk so the fax card can have a whole lot of phone numbers, one per email user, and route the incoming graphics messages based on the number called. Regards, John Levine, johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|lotus}!esegue!johnl