This is my last project at the moment.

I am looking for a fax server for our office. This is just research right now and nothing has been approved for actually going through with this.

One piece of software I have found is Hylafax for Linux.
Does anybody have any experience with this?
Does anybody have any experience with any other free/cheap fax server alternatives?
Does anyone have any experience with more expensive fax server alternatives?

How does a fax get routed to individual email users?
Do they just sit on the fax server waiting for one to log in and claim their fax?

How do you send a fax from your pc to the fax server to be faxed elsewhere in the world?

Thanks for any information you can provide!

Rene

I have used Hylafax and a commercial system. Hylafax works fine, but it's a pain to set up, and (the last time I looked) the Windows clients were a little obtuse. This may have changed. Commercial systems are easier to set up, but cost a godawful amount of money. As far as maintenance goes, I have seen little upkeep on either system.

Incoming faxes generally work like this: you can have specific incoming numbers routed to specific inboxes. There will generally be a generic number where all users who do not have a dedicated number will get their faxes sent to. This may be your only number. From there, it may just be a big come-and-get-it pool, or you might have someone whose job it is to forward the generic-number faxes to the specific recipients. There's not really any way to automate this. (I suppose you might be able to set up some sort of OCR, but I can't imagine it would have a good hit rate.)

The stalwart fax package for Linux has been efax for some time. This is a command-line utility that can send and/or receive facsimile transmissions, making it a very handy building block for any sort of custom (scripts, perl, awk, C, whatever) application one wants to layer on top of it.

Cheers

ive used hylafax mostly for sending. We used w2hfax as a windows client, it did require some modification just to make it run though. I don't believe anyone currently maintains that client. I configured redmon and a print to pdf server thingy. WIndows clients would "print" what they wanted to send, w2hfax would pickup that "print job" and bring up a dialog box for a fax number. It does work well once you get it configured and requires little monitoring.

I did a lot of research into this last year and finally setteled on "snappy fax server", which is winders based, if that's ok. You can d/l it and try it out, which is nice.