Hey all,

I'm faxing someone and while it's not a matter of life and death I would like to receive any reply, and it could be a while before I get any. So I was setting up 2talk's faxmail service. Had some issues nothing critical except for one. I can send faxes to myself from 2talk and they work fine. I thought I'd try sending one from a fax modem just to make sure. Sounded easy enough. Hours later and wasting a several dollars (I have an 028 account and my toll call provider is a bit expensive) it seems it's not.

Cutting a long story short, I've tried with 2 different modems, one a PCI Lucent/Agere/LSI/whatever they call themselves now soft modem, one a ancient ISA Diamond Multimedia 56k modem (i.e. rather different modems). Both of these have the same problem leading me to believe it's not a modem problem per se. I've also tried different software, specifically the Windows Fax Service and Snappy Fax Desktop trial. As well as on XP and Vista (well it was the Snappy software).

I first used the Windows Fax Service and found it seems to die when sending the second page. It wants to try again (I usually stop it although once I let it try again and it failed a second time). I received the first page by mail and since there's a header I can see it's supposed to be two pages. Thinking it may be something silly with the Windows Fax Service I tried some other software eventually  deciding on Snappy Fax Desktop trial. This was quite illuminating as I now found out what seems to be the problem.

When it reaches the end of the second page, it keeps trying to resend the last packet eventually timing out. My guess is that the 2talk service is not sending whatever acknowledgement the modem expects, whether it's for the page, the text or whatever (or perhaps it sends it in the wrong order). This doesn't of course say which one is technically wrong. Note that although the modems are somewhat old, I don't think damage is the cause given thy both of behave the same (unless there's some sort of tone they only send when done that they tends to die fast). I did actually have several broken modems with varying things like not detecting the dial tone. This seems much more like a software bug/incompatibility between the two.

BTW I've also tried sending 3 pages and you guessed it, the first two are fine, the last one fails. And 2 pages of the same thing (more or less, the header was different) didn't help. I never got around to trying one page.

Anyway I haven't asked 2talk about it yet, but I'm quite interested in hearing if anyone has either had success or failure receiving faxes via the 2talk faxmail service from something other then 2talk. Especially real fax machines (and old ones at that). By success I of course mean receiving the whole fax. Of course if anyone has a local number and is willing to try it themselves that would be great too!

BTW 2talk sending faxes to my modem is fine.

Cheers

P.S. Sorry about the other post. I accidentally clicked enter. Tried to delete it but didn't seem to work. Took to long to compose my real message to edit