Using mail to fax services

The process of converting an e-mail to a fax is relatively simple. All that has to be done is send your e-mail to one of the many fax forwarding services that are available today. This article covers using the service offered by "The Phone Company". At the time of writing, this service was completely free. The information that this service requires to forward the e-mail is primarily the recipients details ie name, fax no. etc. All this information has to be embedded in the "Mail To" (aka addressee) field of the e-mail. The format of the addressee field is given below:-

remote-printer.user/location@phone.iddd.tpc.int

The values for the various parameters are:-

remote-printer.	Must always be the first part of the address and must always be 'remote-printer.' in lower case. Don't forget the full stop!
user	Name of recipient. This value must be in lower case only and can only use letters a-z and numbers 0-9. No spaces, commas or other punctuation characters can be used although first and second name can be separated by a dash '-' or under score '_'.
/	Forward slash. Must always be used to separate 'user' and 'location'.
location	Can be business name or just left as 'home'. Punctuation rules are the same as for 'user'.
@	'AT' sign. Must always be used before 'phone'.
phone	The full international telephone number of the recipient including country and area code. When using country + area codes, the country code (44 for UK) replaces the first digit of the area code (eg Harrogate would become 441423). The normal local phone number then follows the country + area code. Only the digits 0-9 may be used to make the complete number.
.iddd.tpc.int	The final part of the address. It must follow after the 'phone' number and be spelt exactly as shown including all the leading full stops.

So if you want to send a fax to 'Fred Bloggs' at the 'Box Factory' in Harrogate and their fax number was 555444, the addressee would be:-

remote-printer.fred_bloggs/the_box_factory@441423555444.iddd.tpc.int

If you wished to embed this information within your web page then you could do this by using the HTML code sample below:-

Click <a href="mailto:remote-printer.fred_bloggs/the_box_factory@441423555444.iddd.tpc.int">here</a> to contact us.

Obviously, the embedded information will need to be changed to reflect your addressee details. Any one using this service should note that although it is free, there will be a single page advertisement for 'Demon Internet' with each fax. Also the fax will only consist of plain text. There are limited attachment capabilities. At time of writing, the service could render Gif images and simple Word documents.