asterisk users - May 2005 - Fax service (instead of tdm card)

Hi all,

Sorry if this is too far off-topic, it sounds potentially interesting to 
others though.  I'll be brief.

Rich Adamson wrote:
> I gave up (for now) trying to make spandsp work with the digium TDM
> card. Instead, I signed up with www.trustfax.com at a cost of $9.95
> per year plus $.10/page.  Since we only deal with an estimated 120
> pages per year, the total cost of about $22/year seemed like a very
> reasonable alternative. (At least until we can find out why the TDM
> card does not function properly with spandsp.)
There seem to be a lot of these companies popping up and going away 
again, each with their own limits and flaws.  TrustFax for example, only 
allows you to fax North American numbers.

For the occasions when Fax is still used, in my experience, it tends to 
be issues where it's either confidential (fax often feels more secure 
than email), or time critical.  I'd hate to rely on the timely delivery 
of a fax, only to find out that TrustFax bounced my email because they 
didn't want to fax the country I wanted to send to.

If someone has a suggestion of a company providing a reliable fax 
service, that's been around for a while, and will fax to most countries, 
please let me know off list.

Perfect solution would perhaps be something based on IPP and Postscript, 
to avoid a lot of conversion/formating issues.

Flames can also be directed to my personal inbox.

If I get a few decent suggestions (and not too many flames for being 
off-topic), I'll post a quick review of the different offerings.

Terje

FYI to the list....

I gave up (for now) trying to make spandsp work with the digium TDM
card. Instead, I signed up with www.trustfax.com at a cost of $9.95
per year plus $.10/page.  Since we only deal with an estimated 120
pages per year, the total cost of about $22/year seemed like a very
reasonable alternative. (At least until we can find out why the TDM
card does not function properly with spandsp.)

For those that might want to consider the same approach, the TrustFax
service provides a dedicated toll-free number, nice web management 
facility, and automatic email of any fax received (in pdf format). 
Their site keeps a copy of the incoming fax for some period of time, 
so doing an online view or resend is a nice backup. That service 
also provides an email-to-fax facility, but when sending a Word 
document in that manner, their conversion results in different page 
margins which _may_ impact the layout of the original document.

Very very nice service at a very inexpensive overall cost! No more
paper, and no more junk faxes. :)

For what its worth, they also allow you to rebrand the service to
your customers if that's needed.