10.6  JUST THE FAX, MA'AM


Yes, the Internet is by far the world's largest computer network.  But 
not everybody's connected to it -- yet.  Thanks to some Internet 
pioneers, however, you can now extend the reach of the Net to people who 
still rely on fax machines.

In 1993, Carl Malamud, founder of the Internet Multicasting Service 
(which now provides everything from a half-hour talk show broadcast over 
the Internet to databases of patent and SEC information) and Marshall 
Rose, a computer consultant, created a mechanism for translating Internet 
e-mail messages into faxes.  Today, you can reach a number of 
metropolitan areas in the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Korea, 
Portugal, New Zealand and the United Kingdom via their service. 

TPC depends on a series of volunteers, from individuals to large 
corporations, who have agreed to provide Internet-to-fax services in a 
given geographic area.  Technically, TPC is an experiment at this point; 
one of the issues Malamud and Rose are looking at for the long term is 
how to make the system pay for itself.

Sending a fax via TPC is as easy as sending an e-mail message, with the 
exception of figuring out the e-mail address to use for a given fax, 
which, to an outsider, looks awfully bizarre.

First, you want to get a TPC coverage list to see if the person you want 
to reach is in an area served by TPC.  Send an e-mail message to tpc-
coverage@town.hall.org (it doesn't really matter what you say in the 
message; "send info" works fine).  You'll get back a list showing the 
metropolitan areas now covered, as well as, in many cases, the specific 
exchanges within those areas you can reach. Assuming the person you want 
to reach is in one of these areas, you're ready to go. 

Now to figure out the e-mail address for a given fax number.  
Take the phone number and add the particular country's international 
dialing code to the front  -- even if you're sending a fax to somebody in 
your own country (the U.S.'s international code is 1).  Do not, however, 
include whatever digits you would dial just to get an international 
circuit (which in the U.S. would be 011). Now remove any parentheses, 
hyphens or spaces.  So, for example, 1 (213) 555-1234 would become 
12135551234. Add ".iddd.tpc.int" to the end of that, for example: 

     12135551234.iddd.tpc.int

That's the part of the address to the right of the @ sign.  The left half 
of the address will look something like this: 

     remote-printer.John_Doe/5th_floor

This is actually a clever way to have a cover sheet printed for your fax. 
All TPC addresses start with "remote-printer."  The next part, as you can 
see, is the name of the person you want to reach.  Since you can't have 
spaces in an Internet address, always separate the names with a _. A TPC 
fax server interprets a / as a message to move to the next line on the 
cover page.  So put all this together, and you get: 

     remote-printer.John_Doe/5th_floor@12135551234.iddd.tpc.int


Phew!  But it works!  Now compose your e-mail message and send it to the 
address you've just created. TPC will then route it to the nearest 
participating fax machine, for delivery to your recipient.  Once your fax 
is delivered, you'll even get a confirmation notice via e-mail.  If you 
have addresses you plan to write to more than once, it would make eminent 
sense to put them in your Pine or Elm address book.  Speaking of Pine, 
you can use its ability to forward message attachments to send graphics 
as part of the fax.  See under FYI to see how to get information on this.