Inbound Fax to Email with FaxLine

[lrw]

I have sent myself 2 faxes- the quality on both was quite poor. I have been using Onesuite.com for faxes and the quality of their pdfs has been excellent.
Also I asked that the faxes be forwarded to two email addresses ( mine and my wife's) In both cases the faxes were only forwarded to the first email address listed.

Lew

[rnovak]

I just compared a couple of my test faxes between onesuite and this service. The quality is a bit lower on the FaxLine service, but for a free service it's acceptable.

Neither service seems to support color fax, but I haven't run into anything that does.

[kgc]

I just got the survey request and sent a couple of faxes... there seems to be a problem with "Super Fine" faxes.

I had a suspicion that superfine faxes were going to be displayed doubled in height but it should be easy to fix. I had some issues putting the faxes raw tiff into pdfs where the resulting pdfs didn't like the faxes non-square pixels. As to general quality issues - there isn't any post processing of the fax images now beyond putting them through the OCR system. It is difficult to develop a system of image optimization that will be able to improve the quality of all the faxes that pass through it - you can make text sharper but turn raster images all black, etc.

[dane]

I just sent myself a document from four different machines of various vintages, and the results all looked good. One had some vertical streaks, but looks like something from the scanner in the sending machine.

-Dane

[mkld]

I sent myself two test faxes. The first one failed utterly, noted here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=103

The second one, however, was just fine, comparable in quality to a traditional fax (or better!).

This is a really nice "bonus" for Sonic customers. I set mine up as a "novelty," since I have both a traditional fax machine and online access elsewhere, but once the bugs are worked out, I'll have my mom send me things to this number, since most of what she sends does not require they be printed out, saving paper & ink (usually things like medical bills, etc., she needs me to read & interpret).

Thanks for all your work with this!

[virtualmike]

Overall, I like the direction the service is going, and I'm happy to be using it at the onset.

I sent three test faxes to both my Faxline and another fax-to-email service.

I received all three faxes, and can open all of them in any PDF reader, although one page of one fax displays wonky in all but one PDF reader.

Kelsey, I'd be happy to provide you with the three PDFs, screen shots showing the broken rendering in various PDF readers, and the TIFF files provided by my other service (for comparison). How would you like the files delivered? (745K for the six fax files, and I'm guessing about the same for the five screen shots.) Feel free to contact me by email or PM about the files. ...cheers!

[kgc]

It looks like the root of the problem was hocr2pdf which I'm using to merge the OCR markup and the original tiff into a pdf. With some, but not all tiff input, hocr2pdf either corrupts the tiff in the process or produces an invalid pdf where the tiff isn't displayed correctly. While I get in touch with the developers, I've disabled the OCR component and for now we are just using tiff2pdf. This also solves the fax resolution issues.

Would it be okay to share your example of a corrupted pdf with the exactimage developers? If so, just forward me a copy of the original email or send me the fax's UUID.

[mkld]

Would it be okay to share your example of a corrupted pdf with the exactimage developers? If so, just forward me a copy of the original email or send me the fax's UUID.

I just forwarded you my faxes, feel free to share with any appropriate people. Nothing "private" (except the sending phone number) about what I scanned, LOL. (Raley's Coupons - I grabbed the first mundane thing I could find to fax)

[virtualmike]

Kelsey, I sent you files by email that you can feel free to share with the exactimage developers.

[dsflamm]

Can you provide any information regarding the security of incoming faxes? It is obviously no more secure than email, but what about the data stream between the phone line and the email send? My concern is from the standpoint of other people sending me their sensitive personal information -- I need to disclose the risk they are taking if I ask them to send me a fax this way, and I am wondering if the risk is more than the risk of someone hacking into my email service.

Along the same lines, assuming the risk is dominated by the email segment, may I suggest adding an encryption option to the creation of the pdf file containing the fax?