James Freer wrote:
I read your post with interest - i'd also like to know the best way of faxing with Linux. Winfax i don't think is your best choice.
There are two separate issues here for me.
One is that at present the office uses Winfax, and I'm the only one using a Linux desktop, so that won't change in the short term. In its current configuration it emails faxes to me in .FXM format which I can't access from Linux.
The second issue is that, for a whole variety of reasons, Winfax is hell and we'd love to be rid of it. That's a longer term problem, but the solution needs to be Windows friendly (we have a number of low-tech customers we support who also use Winfax and who also need a replacement). Winfax has several limitations, most of which stem from its ownership (is it just me or is "being bought out by Symantec" the software equivalent of the kiss of death?). It has been discontinued, has problems in XP/SP2 and completely breaks with Vista, I believe, and has numerous bugs and odd "quirks" which you'd accept in version 1 of something like this but not version 10.
The solution to all of these problems, I am sure, is Hylafax, provided we can find a suitable Windows client (and provided we can get Hylafax working properly, something we've failed to do in the past, albeit with insufficient time to spend doing the job properly). Any suggestions along those lines from people using Hylafax welcomed - because if my inability to open .FXM files spurs me on to replacing Winfax altogether nobody is going to mourn its passing here.
[Aside: A recent upgrade to our internal mail server completely broke WinFax's ability to send faxes by email. After some diagnosis, it turned out that its SMTP client is "basic" to say the least. It sends commands without any checking of the responses, and since it does not send a HELO at the start of the conversation, and since the mail server upgrade meant that we started to require that, it sent entire faxes to the server without realising that each line it sent was being met with an error message. That kind of lazy programming in a mainstream package is scary! Fortunately we could configure the mail server not to require HELO and work around this, but if the writing wasn't on the wall for Winfax before then it was afterwards.]
NB: I have tried various things to get Winfax running under Wine as a temporary measure with no success. Since we're using a client-server model and since my PC is only a client, I didn't need to worry about modems etc. But it won't even install properly, and attempts to copy the files from another PC and just run the standalone fax viewer generate more errors than I care to waste time diagnosing.
Mark Rogers