AsterFax the Email to Fax Gateway for Asterisk.
---------------   We have moved -----------------


AsterFax and Asterisk IT have both been renamed.

Asterfax is now known as Noojee Fax

Asterisk IT is now known as Noojee Telephony Solutions.

Noojee Fax documentation and support can now be obtained via:
http://www.noojee.com.au/Page/NoojeeFax
https://wiki.noojee.com.au/Noojee_Fax
http://forums.noojee.com.au

---------------   We have moved -----------------

Asterisk IT is the primary developer and sponsor of AsterFax the Open Source Email to Fax Gateway for Asterisk.
Asterisk I.T. offer a range of support options for AsterFax as well as general Asterisk consulting services.  Contact sales@asteriskit.com.au for more information.
You can also receive support from the Asterfax and Asterisk communities by by posting at the relevant forum.		 Asterisk
trixbox

AsterFax™ - Asterisk Fax

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24th June 2006 AsterFax Version 1 RC 3 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of AsterFax 1.0 rc3.

AsterFax provides an Email to Fax gateway for the transmission of faxes using Asterisk.

Asterisk is an Open Source PBX (or PABX) integrating PSTN telephone lines and VoIP into a single solution, providing all of the functionality of a high end PBX; and best of all its free!

AsterFax builds on the services provided by Asterisk to provide a full fledged email based Fax Gateway.

With AsterFax you can send and receive faxes directly from your existing email client without installing any desktop software.

AsterFax can translate a normal email message into a fax message. You simply enter the destination phone number in the 'To' address, compose your email message and click send. Its that easy.

For more formal correspondence AsterFax also supports a growing number of file formats such as PDF, Tiff, Postscript, MS-Word and OpenOffice Writer. You can either attach the file to your email message or for applications such as MS-Word and OpenOffice you can fax directly from the application by using the 'Send Email' option. The resulting email is sent as a fax message.

For incoming faxes AsterFax support routing of emails based on a Direct In Dial (DID) number. Which means that every person in an organization can have their own private fax number. AsterFax DID to email address mappings can be stored in a simple configuration file or be pulled from an LDAP repository or virtually any Database.

This release includes a few significant bug fixes. The header and footer formatting has been reworked and behaves as expected according to the configuration. The fax routing now recognises multiple fax routes and spurious characters in the default configuration file have been removed.

Very soon AsterFax will ship with trixbox. All required software is available on the trixbox yum repository and the install will be integrated with the trixbox install process.

You can download AsterFax from sourceforge at http://asterfax.sourceforge.net and click the 'Downloads' link on the right hand side.

Enjoy!
The AsterFax Team
http://www.asteriskit.com.au

17th June 2006 AsterFax coming to Trixbox

The AsterFax team is currently working with Andrew Gills of Trixbox (formerly Asterisk @ Home) to include AsterFax as an optional component in Trixbox. There is still a bit of work to do but we are hoping to get it included in the next release.

4th June 2006 AsterFax Version 1 RC 2 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of AsterFax 1.0 rc2. AsterFax provides an Email to Fax gateway for the transmission of faxes using Asterisk. Asterisk is an Open Source PBX (or PABX) integrating PSTN telephone lines and VoIP into a single solution, providing all of the functionality of a high end PBX; and best of all its free! AsterFax builds on the services provided by Asterisk to provide a full fledged email based Fax Gateway. With AsterFax you can send and receive faxes directly from your existing email client without installing any desktop software. AsterFax can translate a normal email message into a fax message. You simply enter the destination phone number in the 'To' address, compose your email message and click send. Its that easy. For more formal correspondence AsterFax also supports a growing number of file formats such as PDF, Tiff, Postscript, MS-Word and OpenOffice Writer. You can either attach the file to your email message or for applications such as MS-Word and OpenOffice you can fax directly from the application by using the 'Send Email' option. The resulting email is sent as a fax message. For incoming faxes AsterFax support routing of emails based on a Direct In Dial (DID) number. Which means that every person in an organization can have their own private fax number. AsterFax DID to email address mappings can be stored in a simple configuration file or be pulled from an LDAP repository or virtually any Database. This release includes a number of install process improvements and minor bug fixes. The install process now creates all the working directories. The compression scheme used in creating TIFF images has been changed to group 4 compression improving the ability to preview faxes using third party TIFF viewers. The DefaultFaxHandler has been fixed to handle both inbound and outbound faxes. Future releases will further improve the install process, provide an init script. We're also looking at providing the RPMs in a public yum repository. You can download AsterFax from sourceforge at http://asterfax.sourceforge.net and click the 'Downloads' link on the right hand side.

29th April 2006 AsterFax ranks in the top 150 sourceforge projects

AsterFax's popularity continues to increase; during April 2006 AsterFax was ranked in the top 150 sourceforge projects. Given that sourceforge host over 100,000 projects and that AsterFax is only 6 months old our socks have been blown completely off. While our ranking will continue to go up and down the trend is ever upward. There is still a lot of hardwork to be done but AsterFax is shaping up to be a huge success, in no small part thanks to the effort of the community that continues to give us feed back on how to improve the product. We continue to work towards creating a best of breed faxing solution for Asterisk and beyond that Linux. In the very near future you can look forward to a greatly simplified install process as well as a final 1.0 release. You have any specific feature request plasee submit them to the appropriate forum.

22nd April 2006 Release candidate 1 of version 1 has been released.

This release includes a number of bug fixes and enhancements. Among the enhancements is an improved txfax patching script. The script has now makes some attempt to determine the version of spandsp installed and copy the appropriate txfax source file. Bug fixes include header and footers on every page and fix for the compression error on some attachments. A new feature has been added to allow for routing of faxes. Faxes can be e-mailed to different addresses or copied to different file locations based on the caller ID or remote station ID.

14th March 2006 AsterFax version 1.0 beta 8 released

After much ado and just plain hard work beta 8 is finally released.
This released was primarily aimed at improving error handling. Previous released of AsterFax where unable to retrieve transmission errors and as such had to assumed that all transmissions failed. With a patch to txfax we can now get acurate error messages and report them when a transmission fails.
A lot of clean up work has also been undertaken as well as support for Rich Text Files and landscape mode.
There is still somework to be done on making the errors human readable.

Beta 8 is another major milestone in AsterFax's development. All significant features slated for the version 1.0 release have now been implemented. The remaining working centres around improving  the installation process, adding additional converters and adding a header to the fax.

Regards,
S. Brett Sutton

4th March 2006 AsterFax support moved to Asterisk IT

I seem to recall an advert for a razor where the promoter makes the claim, "I liked the razor so much I bought the company'. Well the folks here at Noojee IT are so excited about the potential of Asterisk that we have formed a new company dedicated to providing Asterisk related services and products. Asterisk Integrated Telephony (Asterisk I.T.) has just been formed in Australia and will be providing Consulting, Integration, Support and sales of Asterisk related services and Products. It is our belief that at this time Asterisk I.T. is the only company in Australia dedicated to providing Asterisk products and services.
As Asterisk I.T. is focusing on Asterisk, Noojee I.T. will be getting back to normal business (Software development and Networking Services). As such it seems appropriate to move support for AsterFax across to Asterisk I.T. No need to fear as the same team will still be supporting Asterfax as wwww.asteriskit.com.aue have all moved across to Asterisk I.T.

Please note the Asterisk I.T. web site is still a work in progress and will change rapidly over the next month or so.

Regards,
S. Brett Sutton.

1 February 2006 AsterFax version 1.0 beta 7 released

Beta 7 was introduced to allows AsterFax to deal with a number of usage scenarios identified from user feed back.
Only one of the features originally slated for  Beta 7 has been included in this release (transmission of unsent faxes after a restart) all other features slated for beta 7 have now been pushed back to beta 8.

The main points of Beta 7 are:
Improved documentation.
Multiple attachments are now handled and all transmitted rather than just the first attachment.
Fix for NullPointerException when sending an HTML Cover Page.
Automatic setting of execute permissions on all scripts.
Audit Log no includes a page count.
The Page size (Letter, A4 etc.) can now be set via AsterFax.xml.
AsterFax can now be successfully run in the background.
A new experimental Web interface for sending faxes.

For additional notes on Beta 7 read the release notes.

17 January 2006 AsterFax version 1.0 beta 6 released

Beta 6 introduces a number of new features and bug fixes.

Features:

Cover Page
Perhaps the most significant enhancements is the addition of support for a cover page. The email body is now used as a cover page for the fax. This allows you to fax a document by attaching it to an email and to create a quick cover page for the fax by typing a message into the body of the email.

Self Diagnostics
AsterFax now contain a number of self diagnostics which will be run on start-up to check that the configuration details result in an operational system. The Self Diagnostics include checking the existence and permissions on each directory.
Archiving of faxes
Each fax sent can be sent to a designated mail box for archiving.
Expansion of supported file formats
The list of standard converters has be expanded to support all file formats supported by OpenOffice.
Introduction of plain text and html converters.
Delivery Receipt
Support of a Delivery Receipt email option where by a confirmation email is sent to the users inbox when the fax is successfully delivered.

Support for explicit outbound SMTP Server
When sending email messages AsterFax used the sender's domain to determine the SMTP server to use for sending emails.
the outbound SMTP Server can now be explicitly configured however the default mode is still available.

Bug Fixes

Premature deletion of Tiff file
Beta 6 fixes a major bug caused by the tiff file being deleted before Asterisk can transmit the file.
This bug is timing sensitive so doesn't happen in all cases.
Thanks to Alex Gerelli for help in identifying this one.
A host of other minor bug fixes
HTML conversion caused over-writes
Emails with an HTML body were unreadable as all the lines contained in the HTML where displayed in a single location.
AsterTest ignored port settings
AsterTest was ignoring the command line port number used to connect to AsterFax and instead was always using port 25.
Shut-down throwing exceptions
AsterFax would often throw an exception when shutting down or even hang. The shut-down logic has been cleaned up and tested.


27 December 2005 AsterFax version 1.0 beta 5 released

Beta 5 introduces two new features and a number improvements to the configuration of AsterFax particularly with respect to default settings.
New Features:
Integration with Sendmail/Postfix/Exchange Server etc... via procmail.
With the release of Beta 5 AsterFax now has two modes of accepting emails for faxing. The exiting mode where AsterFax acts as an SMTP gateway plus a new mode where AsterFax can be configured to monitor a directory where Mime encoded mail files are placed for AsterFax to process. The recommended method is to use procmail to extract the mail messages out of the mail server pipeline. As of this witting, instructions for configuring procmail still aren't available however I'm hoping to be able to supply some in the near future.

Audit trail
An audit trail is now written for every fax transmitted. The audit trail is written to logs/audit.log. The log file is configured via log4j.xml and the
default configuration rolls the audit file over each night. If you are familiar with log4j you can modify the location and method of storing the audit trail.

Improved Debugging
A number of new debugging options are now available via the AsterFax.xml file to aid it diagnosing problems with AsterFax.

Upgrade Instructions
For those of you who are upgrading from a previous beta please read the release notes for details on what is required.

Of Note:
AsterFax has now surpassed 400 downloads and is now ranked 305th out of some 100,000 projects on sourceforge, which given that its only been available for 6 weeks is a fairly good effort. I would like to thank all of those users who have been posting feed back and problems on the support forums as it helps greatly in improving AsterFax.

Well I'm off for a well earned holiday with my family on the beautiful beaches of Merimbula (its summer in Australia). As I've decided to take my wife and family along with me ;) , I'm probably not going to be able to get near a computer for the next two or three weeks (except surreptitiously) so support will be a little adhoc until about the 16th.

In the mean time have a wonderful new year.
Regards,
S. Brett Sutton

15 December 2005 AsterFax version 1.0 beta 4 released

For me Beta 4 is a milestone release as AsterFax now has a truly useful set of functionality and most of the big bugs have been removed. Beta 4 introduces support for MS-Word and Open Office Writer attachments as well as resolving issues with PDF and Postscript attachments. The documentation has also been improved to provide more detailed installation instructions. Beta 4 also introduces support for multiple channels along with priorities for those channels so you can setup preferences as to which channel should be used first.
As always I'm keen to get any feed back on bugs or enhancement suggestions which you can post through the  AsterFax sourceforge forums .

I hope you enjoy AsterFax version 1.0 beta 4.

Regards,
S. Brett Sutton
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