How the TPC Fax Project Works

How The TPC Fax Project Works

The TPC Fax Project is a volunteer effort put on by the Internet community. 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.

Many ISP's, companies and educational institutions participate in the project, covering many parts of the world including the US, Canada, Australia, UK, and various other parts of the world. With the area of coverage changing on a weekly basis, we encourage you to visit the TPC web site and review the coverage listing page.

With the TPC Project, faxes are sent via e-mail across the internet. If a fax server is available to cover the area where your target fax number is located, your e-mail message is routed to that fax server for processing.

When your e-mail fax message arrives at the fax server, it is converted and sent via a local phone call to the recipient's fax machine. The cover page for this fax usually contains information about the TPC project, as well as the local site that is sending the fax. The local operator of the TPC Fax server is allowed to ad a 1/3 page advertisement to the cover page as well. You should take care to place your phone and fax numbers on your document to ensure the recipient will understand which phone and fax numbers to reply to.

SDFax makes the job of sending faxes from a Macintosh easy. SDFax works just like a printer and will automatically convert your printout into an appropriately formatted e-mail message and sends it to your local ISP for delivery. With SDFax, you can easily send faxes with complete formatting, pictures and fonts instead of just plain text e-mail.

Once your fax has been sent from the remote fax server, an e-mail message will be sent back to you confirming delivery. Some sites have many faxes to send and may be backlogged for a day or two. Be patient. You should receive confirmation within a few days.

If you still have questions about the operation of the TPC Fax project, visit http://www.tpc.int The TPC Homepage has links to many FAQ pages and other great sources of information.