FAX gateway instructions (last changed Feb 4 2002)

[faxhelp at cac.washington.edu]

=========================================================================

C & C   E X P E R I M E N T A L   E M A I L - T O - F A X   G A T E W A Y

=========================================================================

To receive the latest version of this document, send email without anything
in the body of the message to:  faxhelp at cac.washington.edu


W H A T   I S   P R O V I D E D

This is the help file for University of Washington C&C's experimental
email-to-fax gateway service--a service that can print TEXT, PostScript,
PDF, and Image (GIF, JPEG, TIFF) data with nearly laser-printer quality
on fax machines anywhere in the world (as long as the call is free or can
be billed to you--see info about new local areacodes in section 5 below).

If you use this service and have problems or comments, please send them to:
   help at cac.washington.edu

After you send an email fax, you receive confirmation by email
when your fax is (or can not be) delivered.  This receipt also
gives the last updated time of this document so you can tell if
there is anything new you should know.


T O P I C S

1 - IMPORTANT THINGS NOT TO DO!
2 - How to send a simple fax N-up
3 - How to specify additional options such as BOLD and YOUR FAX NUMBER
4 - How to send PostScript correctly
5 - How to call long distance (you'd never guess--you must read this)
6 - How to send MIME attachments (images & PDF must be MIME attachments)
7 - How to force a cover page (not usually necessary)
8 - How you know what happened (transmission receipts)


1 - I M P O R T A N T   T H I N G S   N O T   T O   D O   !

a) Don't put your secret UWATS or Credit Card number in the obvious place
   in the telphone number part of the email address--it can easily be
   stolen there, so the gateway will not accept it there.  See #5.

b) Don't CC long-distance faxes to other email recipients; they
   will see a copy of your secret UWATS number.  See #5.

c) Don't send PostScript that gets misinterpreted as TEXT--it prints as
   lots of garbage.  See #4.

d) Don't send email attachments which are not MIME--they fax as TEXT and
   will probably print as lots of garbage.  See #6.

e) Don't combine PostScript files yourself--let the gateway do it by
   sending them as multiple attachments to a single message.  See #4, #6.

f) Don't ignore the contents of "bounced" mail you get back from the
   gateway.  If the gateway has trouble with your email, it will try to
   tell you why in the "transcript" section of mail you get back from
   MAILER-DAEMON or faxhelp.  It can be a little hard to find, but
   please look for it.

g) Don't monopolize the gateway.  Faxes take an average of one minute per
   page for TEXT and several times that for Images.  Gateway capacity is
   limited.  If you have several LARGE faxes to send and you aren't in a big
   hurry, don't mail them all at once.  Send a few, wait for confirmation
   of delivery, and then send some more.  That way, other people's faxes
   which queue up behind your first batch can go out before your second
   batch.


2 - H O W   T O   S E N D   A   S I M P L E   F A X   N-UP

Fax output should appear nearly laser-printer quality (200dpi) on most fax
machines so 2-up and even 4-up printing is not only possible but legible
and desirable if you wish to reduce paper waste and telephone time.  This
gateway can either N-up your fax for you or you can do it yourself (2-up
means two pages reduced slightly and printed side by side on a rotated page;
4-up means four pages reduced 50 percent and printed in the original
orientation).

To use this gateway to cause TEXT or "conforming" PostScript to be
printed 2-up on some fax machine, email it to:

    recipient_name at telephone_number/2up.fax.cac.washington.edu

N-up values of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9 are supported, however 1, 2, and 4
are the most likely to be useful (and "/1up", the default, can be omitted
entirely).

Telephone numbers in the US should always be given as 10-digits (with
areacode) like this:  206-765-4321.  (Do NOT use dots in telephone numbers.)
We are currently in a transition phase where 7-digit (206 areacode assumed)
and 5-digit (campus) telephone numbers are still acceptable.

For security reasons, UWATS and credit-card numbers are not permitted in
the telephone number field.  See #5.

If you wish to fax the same message to multiple recipients, each recipient
will need to be specified with a complete address such as the one above.


3 - H O W   T O   S P E C I F Y   A D D I T I O N A L   O P T I O N S

If you wish to convey YOUR FAX NUMBER to the FAX recipient, you
may do so by adding /myfax=206-123-4567 after the /Nup and before
the .fax.cac.washington.edu, for example:

    John_Jones at 206-685-4321/2up/myfax=206-123-4567.fax.cac.washington.edu

If you are sending a TEXT fax to a thermal-paper fax machine and the
recipient complains it is too "light" or if you are sending it to a
PC+modem where it is likely to be read on a monitor where not all the
dots in the fax are visible, you may want to send fatter characters than
you get with the default TEXT font.  You can ask the gateway to use a
BOLD font for TEXT by adding the /bold option after the /Nup and before
the .fax.cac.washington.edu, for example:

    John_Jones at 206-685-4321/2up/bold/myfax=206-123-4567.fax.cac.washington.edu

The order of /options is not important, but they must all be between the
telephone number and ".fax" as shown.


4 - H O W   T O   S E N D   P O S T S C R I P T   C O R R E C T L Y

PostScript is distinguished from TEXT by either being a MIME ATTACHMENT
claiming to be PostScript or by being the ENTIRE MESSAGE BODY AND BEGINNING
with the two characters "%!".  Take care when sending your PostScript to
make sure it will be recognized as PostScript, because when it is printed
as TEXT it is very long and useless.  Also remember when the entire message
body is being interpreted as PostScript, you probably don't want to append
your usual signature (because it probably isn't valid PostScript).

PostScript sometimes has extremely long lines which can get broken up by
email software between you and the gateway.  This is not always a problem,
but sending your PostScript as a MIME attachment is one solution.

Currently, the gateway can N-up all TEXT and many flavors of "conforming"
PostScript.  (Conforming PostScript follows strict organizational
guidelines and can therefore be manipulated in chunks as delimited by Adobe
document structuring lines beginning with %%).

NOTE:  Concatenating conforming PostScript files yields PostScript
that claims to be conforming but is NOT--the %% lines are now incorrect.
It may or may not fax correctly.  If you want to fax several PostScript
files at once, attach each as a separate MIME attachment and let the
gateway combine them.

When you fax PostScript that is not "conforming", the gateway will
tell you (for your information) in the transmission receipt it sends you.

If you are using a PC to generate your PostScript, use the various print
options to try to generate conforming PostScript.  The Microsoft Windows
PostScript printer driver *can* do it, but it isn't the default.

The PostScript font families currently supported are:

    AvantGarde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, NewCenturySchlbk
    Palatino, Symbol, Times-Roman, Utopia, Zapf

Others may become available at a later time.  (Watch this space).

If your PostScript contains definitions of other fonts, it should work
fine unless the definitions are bitmaps designed for higher resolution
printing, in which case the resulting fax will look like it has been
photocopied too many times.  TRY TO AVOID BITMAP FONTS.  TrueType fonts
and other "Outline" or "Type 1" fonts should be fine.  If you use TeX with
dvips, try the -D 200 (200 dpi) option because dvips generates bitmap
fonts for 300 dpi by default.


5 - L O N G   D I S T A N C E   A N D   U W A T S   C H A R G E   N U M B E R S

Long distance numbers are generally of the form 123-765-4321.
International telephone numbers begin with 011 and are followed by country
code, city code, and local number.  You must omit leading zeros from the
city code and also omit any '#' signs you might need when dialing manually.

Because the destination email address of a message is usually saved in
easily readable log files of every system that forwards it, we don't
want your secret UWATS or Credit Card numbers to be part of the email
address.  For this reason, we require your seven-digit UWATS number be
transmitted at the end of the subject field of your message, enclosed in
"(-" and "-)" with no spaces *exactly* like this:  (-1234567-) .  The fax
gateway will remove the number, dashes, and parentheses, so your fax
recipients will not see your UWATS number.

Because we never receive (and therefore can not delete the UWATS number
from) copies of fax mail sent to non-fax addresses, we further require that
*all* recipients listed in the To:  and Cc:  fields be fax addresses if a
UWATS number is used.

If your mail program saves a copy of all mail you send (in sent-mail,
perhaps) YOUR UWATS NUMBER WILL BE IN THAT FILE, so, depending on how much
you trust the security on that system, you may want to take appropriate
action.

A UWATS number will NOT be used for toll-free calls even if it is provided.
UWATS numbers are used/needed only for long-distance telephone numbers with
areacodes other than 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 206, 425 and 253 (which are
all within the university's extended toll-free dialing area).  If you have
a mix of local and long distance telephone numbers, your UWATS number will
be used only where it is needed.


5.1 - P E R S O N A L   C R E D I T   C A R D   N U M B E R S (maybe)

This is an experiment--WE DO NOT PROMISE TO CONTINUE TO SUPPORT THIS.
It is complicated and fragile and difficult to do right with existing
modems and telephone systems.  International calling by credit card is
also not supported.

As an experiment, we have generalized the UWATS mechanism to allow people
to *try* to use their personal telephone credit cards to place personal
long distance faxes; HOWEVER, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO MAKE THIS WORK RELIABLY
FOR ALL LONG DISTANCE COMPANIES because there may be no way for the modem
to know how long to delay after dialing the phone number before dialing
the secret code.  If experience shows that the personal credit card
experiment is not working, it will be terminated, so please keep that in
mind.  If you can't get it to work for you in a couple of tries, you
should probably assume it isn't working for your long distance carrier.

That said, if you have an AT&T/US West/GTE credit card number, you may
try to use it by following the UWATS directions above but substituting
your credit card number for the UWATS number and preceding it by 1 or more
dial-delay commas, where each comma represents 2 seconds of dial delay (7
commas--about 14 seconds--seems good today).  Try dialing
9-0-areacode-number by hand a few times to try to measure and predict the
delay.  It will probably depend on how busy the AT&T lines are.  A few
seconds too much delay may be OK, too little will not work.  You would
use something like ,,,,,,,12345678901234 as a "UWATS" number and put
(-,,,,,,,12345678901234-) in the subject of your email.

If you use MCI or SPRINT, you may have better luck.  The gateway currently
detects the alternate carrier access codes for MCI and SPRINT and
substitutes a different access method that seems to work better today.
Specify 102220-areacode-number for MCI or 103330-areacode-number for SPRINT
and use a single comma preceding your calling card number in place of the
UWATS number in the UWATS directions above.  Watch this space if things
change.

Because the Big Three long distance companies charge so much for
using their calling cards, a few discount cards are also supported:

  If you use a pre-paid AT&T calling card (access via 1-800-506-9511 or
     1-800-569-6972) Specify 104440-areacode-number and (-,,,,,12digitPIN-)

  If you use a Sams Club pre-paid MCI calling card (access via 1-800-965-7708)
     Specify 105550-areacode-number and (-,,,,,10digitPIN-)

  If you use a Costo pre-paid MCI calling card (access via 1-888-283-8215)
     Specify 106660-areacode-number and (-,,,,,10digitPIN-)

  If you use a Costo pre-paid MCI calling card (access via 1-888-845-8084)
     Specify 107770-areacode-number and (-,,,,,10digitPIN-)


6 - S E N D I N G   A T T A C H M E N T S   A N D   I M A G E S

GIF, JPEG and TIFF images (and PDF files) can be sent only as MIME
attachments.  Images are rotated and scaled to best fill the page.  Because
processing images (and PDF files) is slow and memory-intensive, GIF files
larger than 1 megabyte and JPEG or TIFF files larger than 200 Kbytes will
not be accepted.  PostScript and TEXT can also be sent as MIME attachments.

To send a MIME attachment, you must use a mail program, such as PINE,
which is capable of doing so.  NeXTmail and Sun's MailTool do not (at this
time) generate MIME attachments.  Attachments which are not MIME will
probably fax as many pages of garbage.

There is no fixed limit to how many attachments can be sent in one fax.
Each attachment begins a new page.  Each attachment is N-upped separately.
When you send TEXT as an attachment, the email headers you normally get
prepended to your non-attached TEXT will not be present.

MIME attachments have an associated type which is determined by the
mailer.  Only TEXT, PostScript, PDF, GIF, JPEG and TIFF types are supported
by the gateway.  You can not attach and fax an Excel spreadsheet or a Word
*.doc file.  You must instead get the application to "print to a file"
when the chosen printer is of type PostScript (or PDF).  With a little
work, you can configure such a printer definition into your Windows PC so
that printing "conforming" PostScript to a file is just a matter of
selecting "PostScript Printer on FILE:" from a short menu of printers.

If you are unsure of your ability to send a proper attachment with PINE, try
mailing it to yourself before mailing it to the gateway.  The current
version of PINE will briefly show you the type of your attachment
when you first attach it and it will always show you the types of
received attachments.

NOTE:  Some versions of Microsoft Mail apparently encode and send
"Rich Text" information in MIME attachments of type APPLICATION/MS-TNEF.
Recipients using Microsoft Mail don't see these, but users of other email
programs (and the fax gateway) do see--but can't use them.  Currently, to
use the fax gateway, you must tell Microsoft Mail NOT to send "Rich Text"
messages.  This seems to be a per-recipient option in the Microsoft
Exchange address book.  Even if you aren't using Microsoft Mail, if you
send a fax by replying to or forwarding a message which once contained an
APPLICATION/MS-TNEF attachment, you may have problems as described in the
NOTE under coverpages below.


7 - C O V E R   P A G E S

Normally, a cover page is not printed (and not needed).  Cover-page info
is stamped in small italic type along the top of each page (where Fax
machines normally print their ID).  If you send your fax document as one
or more MIME attachments and have any text at all in the email body, the
gateway understands that you want that text printed on a cover page and
it will generate one.  However, to prevent inadvertent waste of fax paper
and gateway time printing email ".signature" files on pages by themselves,
the gateway requires that cover page text be at least 10 lines long (or
it will bounce the mail and explain the situation).  Note that if you
really do want just one line printed on a cover page, you may follow it
by nine or more blank lines and the gateway will accept it.  Note also
that only 45 lines of email-body can fit on the coverpage.

NOTE: In Pine versions less than 4.0, if you reply to or forward a message
which has attachments, and you delete the attachments in the composer,
Pine will still send the message in MIME MULTIPART format (which will
signal the fax gateway to treat the message body as coverpage text) even
though there are no attachments/pages after the coverpage.  This is a bug,
sorry.  The result is that the fax gateway puts the message body into the
coverpage if it fits or rejects it if it does not fit.


8 - T R A N S M I S S I O N   R E C E I P T S

Keep a copy of each message you send until you get a transmission receipt!

When your fax is delivered (or if it can not be delivered), you will be
notified via email to the account which originally sent the fax.  Seven
attempts will be made to deliver a fax to a BUSY number before giving up
and discarding it.  The retry interval is five minutes; however, it may be
longer if the system is busy delivering other faxes.  Numbers that don't
answer or are answered by a non-fax-machine are not retried at all.

Your faxes will be identified in the return mail by the time and phone
number to which the fax was sent and the Message-Id your system gave to
the submitted email.  If you have several outstanding faxes, you may
want to keep a record of the times you sent them so you can match up
the receipts as they come in.

The receipt will also give the last updated time of this document so you
can tell if there is anything new you should know about.

The important thing to remember is that, in most cases, you should be
informed relatively promptly whether your fax was delivered or not.  If
you don't hear anything, it probably means that there were other faxes
queued up in front of yours or that the number was busy and the gateway
is still retrying.



Computing and Communications
University of Washington, Seattle