Can you send a Fax Via ASP.NET without Proprietary Software

Question

I was wondering if it is possible to send a Fax via ASP.NET without using proprietary Fax software (i.e. using all .NET native classes)

All I am after is to send a generated PDF to a remote fax machine rather than a printer.

There is this question already, however this chap uses a 3rd party program as the Fax software

EDIT: We have no control over the remote Fax and will have little to no visibility of how the Fax is set up.

Answer 1

If you have a microsoft fax server set up, you can use the Interop.FAXCOMLIB COM component to connect to the server and send a fax. This isn't a pure .NET solution, but you can do this from any .NET code. I'm not sure about sending PDFs either. I've only done it with pictures.

Answer 2

Simpliest way is to have a fax server setup as a networked printer that you can then print to from your app.

Answer 3

There are a lot of fax-to-email providers that work by forwarding any pdf email attachment to the fax number you specify. That approach would also have the advantage that you wouldn't have to worry about big faxes holding up your phone line or queueing and retrying if the fax line is already busy etc.

The .Net Mail classes are easy to use and would make sending an email with a .pdf attachment easy.

Answer 4

You might find it easier and more reliable to use a third party service that will send the fax for you. There are services out there that are preety cheap and have web service front ends.

This way they will handle all the retry logic for example when the line is busy or circuts are busy etc etc...

This also decouples your web server from sending the fax. If you send the fax within the Asp.Net request pipeline, I can only imagine what that might do to the scalability. Not to mention what happens when five users all send a fax at the same time.