Faxing versatility with MyFax, Mail Print and PaperPort

Having “fax” and “versatility” in the same sentence is, of course, an oxymoron but faxes are still used for surprisingly many business communications, partially because no universally accepted (and easy) electronic signing exists yet, and because a faxed smudge of a signature is somehow more legally binding than a typed-out name in a Word document, or scanned and embedded signature in a PDF document.

I recently needed to find a replacement for a fax-machine that was no longer working well, not because the machine itself would’ve been failing, but because the office phones were switched to VOIP some time previously, and fax transmissions don’t like VOIP. Whenever the LAN has more traffic the VOIP compression factor increases which effectively eliminates the “silence” (still thinking in the analogue/acoustic terms) in the fax transmission killing the send or receive that was in progress. The options were to get a POTS line for the fax machine, or to use a fax-service. I opted for the latter as it makes it possible for the people in the office to also retrieve the “office” faxes while on the road, or while working from home. But many people still wanted the arrived faxes printed out in the conventional fashion as well. I searched for some time for the solution, and then stumbled upon Mail Print which automatically retrieves and prints emails and/or their attachments, including PDFs from any standard POP3 account! The fax-service I chose, MyFax.com, sends out the arrived faxes as PDF attachments… I see a solution coming up!

The only remaining problem was the fact that Mail Print currently only runs as a console application and I was planning to run it on the LAN server, preferably as a Windows service. For now, FireDaemon came to the rescue (Frogmore Computer Services is planning to include built-in service support in a future release of Mail Print)! With FireDaemon it was a snap to get Mail Print run as a service. I first configured Mail Print’s settings while logged in as the admin, then set FireDaemon to run the app as a service using the admin account so that Mail Print would use the same settings I had configured at the console (Mail Print stores the configuration settings in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER).

To print the MyFax faxes that arrive as PDF attachments I chose “Print attachments only”. Because Exchange’s Mail Delivery Restrictions/Filters don’t always work as one would except, I chose not to limit accepted senders on the mail server side. Instead, I set up a receive account with a difficult to guess user name (i.e. s0m3-d1ff1cult-t0-gu3ss-us3r@companydomain.com) to prevent 250 pages of Viagra ads being printed over the weekend. 😉 Faxes that arrive at that account are automatically duplicated on arrival at an easy to remember account (i.e. fax@companydomain.com) that only receives emails from internal addresses (i.e. no spam). Mail Print is set to erase the emails from the receive account after they’ve been picked up for printing (Mail Print is set to check for arrived emails every sixty seconds). The end result is that arrived faxes are printed out on a LAN printer, and they’re also available at “fax” account on the company domain which the users can access through the Exchange webmail no matter where they are.

In order for Mail Print to print PDF documents currently a full version (not just the reader) of Adobe Acrobat is needed as Mail Print uses its COM interface which is not available in the Acrobat Reader. A future version of Mail Print may no longer require Acrobat to be present to print PDFs as Frogmore is looking for an alternative library to handle PDF printing internally.

Outbound faxes are sent via MyFax which integrates well with MS Office, and also offers a virtual printer driver. For scanned documents a network scanner is used in combination with Nuance’s PaperPort Professional, which allows easy compositing of documents to be faxed using various sources (scanned documents, Word docs, PDFs, Excel docs, etc.).