Subject: Linux-Activists - DOC Channel digest. 93-9-8-16:24
From: "Linux Activists" <[email-masked]>
To: "Linux-Activists" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1993 22:01:39 +0200

Topics:
	 press releases and an email -> facsimile connection 

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From: Jim Van Zandt <[email-masked]>
Subject: press releases and an email -> facsimile connection 
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1993 14:00:47 +0200

While not many newspapers have email addresses, they probably all have faxes.  
There's now a way to send email to a fax!  The facility was announced on a 
Sunergy broadcast (originated by Sun Microsystems).  The service isn't 
available everywhere, but you can reach the Boston area, Washington D.C.,
Silicon Valley, or anywhere in Australia, for example.  I've appended a 
heavily edited version of their FAQ list, with a pointer to the original 
version.

I suggest we start collecting newspaper fax numbers along with email addresses.

                                 - Jim Van Zandt <[email-masked]>

(By the way, you're supposed to be able to send several kinds of images, as 
well as ASCII text. However, my attempt to send PostScript to a Boston area
fax failed.  I suspect that server lacks the required scan conversion
software.)

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Content-Description: What is this experiment, anyway?

The experiment is a project in outreach: to integrate the e-mail and
facsimile communities.  Working together, many sites cooperatively
provide "remote printing" access to the international telephone
network.  This allows people to send faxes via e-mail.  The
general-purpose Internet e-mail infrastructure takes care of all the
routing, delivering the message to the appropriate remote printer
gateway in a manner totally transparent to the user.

Content-Description: By the way, how can I get another copy of this FAQ?

Send mail to [email-masked].

Content-Description: How can I send something?

    To: remote-printer.Arlington_Hewes/[email-masked]

This will get automatically routed to a remote printer server, which
will transmit a facsimile to the recipient.  When the transmission
completes, a message will be sent back to you.

Let's look at the strings on either side of the '@'-sign.

The left-hand part identifies the kind of access (remote-printer) along
with the identity of the recipient (Arlington_Hewes/Room_403).

Because some mailers have difficulty dealing with addresses that
contain spaces, etc., you should be very careful as to what characters
you use to identify the recipient.  It safest to use upper and lower
case letters, digits, and two special characters ('_' and '/').

When a cover sheet is generated, the '_' will turn into a space and the
'/' will turn into an end-of-line sequence.  So, given the address
above, the cover sheet might start with

    Please deliver this facsimile to:

	Arlington Hewes
	Room 403

The right-hand part identifies the telephone number of the
remote-printer.  It must be an international telephone number.
Telephone numbers are usually written like this:

    +code-number

where "code" identifies the country and "number" is the telephone
number within the country, e.g.,

    +1-415 968 2510

For those interested in telephonic trivia, the maximum number of digits
is 15. In order to get the Internet e-mail infrastructure to
automatically route messages, the punctuation characters are stripped
out, e.g.,

    14159682510

and then the string is inverted and turned into an Internet domain
name, e.g.,

    0.1.5.2.8.6.9.5.1.4.1.tpc.int

(Note that the telephone number should not include any international
access codes.)

Content-Description: How can I find out if there is access to a particular number?

You can send mail to [email-masked], and you'll get back a list 
of the current coverage areas.

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End of DOC Digest
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