Can anyone recommend software that sends faxes over SIP? I have plenty of inbound fax to email services, but now and then I need to send a reply and it looks tacky to use one of the free web ones that put an ad on it.
I know that if I wanted to pay $15/mo there are lots of lovely services but we're taking about one fax a month, maybe, here.
Ideally it'd take a postscript or PDF or Word document and a phone number and fax it to that number. I have Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and MacOS boxes. Any suggestions?
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
Not SIP, but over TCP/IP, I have been happy with iFax from www.ifaxapp.com <http://www.ifaxapp.com/> which takes a document and a phone number and sends the document to that number. Charging is against credits which are available at varying prices.
The iFax application is available for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. I use it on iOS and macOS. See the website for more details on inbound fax, document scanning, HIPAA, and other features.
No. Just NO. The problem is that all the modulation methods that FAX
transmission use requires time stability in the analog channel, and
there is no way that SIP is going to be that stable.
How do I know this? A number of years ago, a cable system maker asked
me to consult on why V.29 fax wouldn't work over their voice-over-coax
solution. I used a 23-tone test on the analog channel for 24 hours, and
found the phase jitter was off the charts -- no way that fax machines
could send faxes over the analog channel. (Traced it to the timing
chain oscillating across the system.)
Have you considered paying the $0.50 per page to have the local copy
shop send the once-a-month faxes?
The other answers have far superior suggestions sending fax over TCP/IP.
I don't really care if it's flaky. For one fax a month a few retries
are not a big deal. But hellofax's free 5 pages a month will probably
do the job.
For folks that have made it this far, you might be interested in this
article that I've kept a link to for over a decade: FAXing over IP networks
You *can* get a fax across a G.711 connection if your throughput,
latency, and jitter align and create what looks like a DS0 to the
two modems. And if does it for a long enough time to get the entire
fax through.
Tune the fax machines so they only run 9600 bps or less, and you might
just make it.
You *can* get a fax across a G.711 connection if your throughput,
My SIP provider supports T.38. How much difference does that make?
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
I would recommend simply outsourcing it to voip.ms for $2 a month. Port
your fax DID to them.
Incoming fax arrive as PDF in your choice of email inbox.
You can send outbound fax from a predefined list of your own email
addresses, destination to fax@voip.ms. Put the destination phone number in
the subject line, attach the document to be faxed as a PDF.
There is also an https web portal for uploading documents to be faxed,
there is no tacky addition of advertisement.
Can anyone recommend software that sends faxes over SIP?
I've had good luck using asterisk's res_fax_spandsp, sending to twilio
(which supports t38). Freeswitch's t38 support also is said to work well.
Hylafax, iaxmodem and asterisk has worked well for mulaw faxing, provided
a low-jitter path to the pstn provider, but lately I've been using the
above path.
Of course that is probably only one fax every few months.