the state of Asterisk faxing

Archived from groups: comp.dcom.voice-over-ip (More info?)

I often rant about all that Asterisk can do. I have discovered some
things it can't do though and I think it's important to disclose
those.

I've been using JFAX/J2/jConnect for years to receive voice and fax
messages (sent as e-mail). Their service went out recently so I
decided to tackle getting Asterisk to handle faxes.

There's a great collection of information on the subject here.
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+fax
I usually use Debian binaries but I downloaded Asterisk and the
SpanDSP code. Lots of problems after that but here are the high
points.

SpanDSP 0.0.1 doesn't seem to work with modern TIFF libraries.
ftp://ftp.opencall.org/pub/spands [...] 0.1/README

N.B. Someone has reported that TIFF 3.6.1 has changed the
headers a bit, and the following may not work without
some changes. I will look into this.

I had TIFF issues. I tried the "whole" bundle.
http://ftp2.tootai.net/spandsp-0.0.1k-whole.tar.gz
That conflicted with existing TIFF headers.

SpanDSP 0.0.2pre versions don't seem to work with rxfax.
ftp://ftp.opencall.org/pub/spands [...] re4/README

If you want a stable version, don't use this one. The
app_rxfax.c and app_txfax.c programs in this directory
will only work with spandsp-0.0.2.

There is no "spandsp-0.0.2" (non-pre) as far as I can tell.

Bottom line...I didn't get it to work. I'm sure it can be made
to work but I'm not up to it right now.

Someday I trust that this will be cleaned and added to Asterisk
main. I'd happily put some money toward a bounty for it.

--kyler