Configuring Fax

The fax feature enables the hand held device users to send a document to a fax machine. The fax machine can be any where, including a local fax machine where the user wants the document in a printed form. In this release, we address one feature where the user can fax one or more documents that are available as a received email attachment(s).

The capability of faxing more than one e-mail attachment is dependent on the Fax Service provider. The default implementation (Fax1.com) does not support this feature as the Fax service provider does not allow the same.

Users can send a complete email message to the service provider which can be printed as a Fax. Users can also be able to specify a different service provider than the one that is configured, in which case, the following information shall be provided by the user:

• Fax Number: The number to which the user intends to send the e-mail as fax.

  The fax number may be suffixed with the fax service provider’s DNS domain name. If this information is not provided, the default, configured domain name shall be used

  For example: <fax#@domain>

• From Address: The e-mail address should match with the fax service account that the user has created with the service provider.

• Subject: Contains the required credential information for service provider to verify the request.

The following limitations are applicable for this feature:

• The type of the document are set by the service providers

• User can only fax the complete email message. They don’t have an option to choose selective attachments in the message and fax them.

• If the message format which the user is trying to fax is non-plain text such as HTML, then the fax contents would not appear as expected. In case of HTML, the fax content would have the HTML code with HTML elements in it. Hence, users must ensure that the fax message is of type plain text. This is a requirement from Fax1

• Since there is no standard which dictates how the email should be formatted for the email to fax services, all service providers define their own format. Formats of the mail differ from provider to provider. Supported attachment types to be faxed may be found by visiting the respective service provider site since not all file types are supported.

For more information on how to configure Fax, see the Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 Command Line Reference guide.