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MailPhax: Your very own email to fax solution

Developers already use Phaxio to save money by sending personal faxes using the command line, but for the less tech saavy who are constantly asking, Phaxio has no built-in email to fax feature. Although consumer faxing isn’t what we’re focused on, we’ve been hounded with questions about setting up email to fax using Phaxio. So we decided to take a stab at writing a standalone email to fax solution; it’s called MailPhax.

There are a couple of really nifty (yeah, I said nifty) things built into MailPhax. We’ve dropped Heroku’s Deploy button in MailPhax’s README which will automatically deploy the project to a free dyno at Heroku in a matter of seconds. Also (and here’s the part your boss will love) unless you’re sending over 10,000 email to fax requests per month, you can utilize the free tier on almost any transactional email vendor. For the easiest install we prefer Mailgun, but you can also use Mandrill or Sendgrid.

MailPhax is a Sinatra app that you can run on any host or service that supports ruby and sinatra. If you like it, please return the favor by spreading it around, and posting something about it (and Phaxio) on Twitter.

How quickly can you get setup? Total setup time is about ten minutes.

Here’s how you do get started. The easiest way to deploy MailFax is using Heroku. First get accounts at both Heroku and a transactional email service like Mailgun.

Next, click the Heroku deploy button in the MailFax Github README to start the app.

The Heroku deploy process will prompt you for your Phaxio API keys and an optional SMTP server for sending outgoing email. (You can use the same mail service for outgoing mail as you use for receiving incoming fax emails.) These settings are stored as environment variables at Heroku.

Once set up, you can send faxes by emailing “thephonenumber@yourdomain.org” where “thephonenumber” is the number you’d like to fax to and “yourdomain.org” is the domain you configured with the mail service. All attachments in the email are then sent to your destination.

If you’d like to contribute to MailPhax, we’d love to hear about it. Shoot an email to info@phaxio.com and let us know what you’re thinking!

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