That’s all I wanna do. I’ve set up a simple menu, and want the caller to be able to dial a number and get a fax tone so they can send a fax and asterisk will receive it. How should I go about doing that? I’ve been doing some reading on faxing with asterisk, but they all seem to concern sending faxes (which i’m not interested on right now). I just want to get faxes on the same FXO (a X100p) that I use for my calls, and want asterisk to process it (save it in the tiff format or something. I don’t need anything fancy like sending it to a mail box)
I assume you have read that the SpanDSP it not fully supported… Anyway that said:
How many lines do you have? Just one or more. If you have one. Asterisk should be able to recognize the fax tones coming in and take care of it.
I’m not sure it can just dump to a tiff file be default.
Just one line. When I didn’t have asterisk, someone would call me and ask me what my FAX # is so they could send me a fax. I would tell them to hold on, and i’d give them a fax tone because i don’t have a separate fax line. In asterisk, i’d like to present an option in the menu for something like “press 3 for a fax tone if you want to fax me” or something like that. I don’t know how can i make that kind of switch in extensions.conf
I don’t understand from your post if you have a fax machine or not - if you do, you needn’t do anything, just fire up the fax machine, no? If you don’t, and you want asterisk to receive the fax (and convert to email), I don’t think it can generate a fax tone, it relies on the sending fax machine assuming there IS a fax machine at the receiving end. ???
Well, I do have a fax machine, but I want to retire it 
I’d like to replace it with Asterisk on the receiving end.
This is what it’d look like
1: Some person calls. They want to send a fax.
2: Asterisk answers (voice menu)
3: The caller selects the option that said "Press 3 if you want to fax us"
4: Asterisk starts acting like a fax
5: Caller sends fax
6: Asterisk receives fax and does all sorts of nifty things like sending it to my e-mail (I’ll worry about how to do the nifty things later… hehe!)
well, you shouldn’t even need to do that. i use a zaptel interface for that and if someone calls with a fax machine, asterisk autodetects the fax tone and i get the fax in my inbox and the inside phone never even rings!
Really? Wow, that’s cool! I’ll read more about it.
Thanks!
you do have to do the right juju in your extension*conf files. it was easy for me, because i installed using asterisk@home (now trixbox). one gotcha: you have to do a 3-second wait or so to give the zaptel driver a chance to detect the incoming fax tone.