T.37 is an
ITU
The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Unio ...
standard which deals with sending
fax
Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...
messages using email. It is also referred to as "Internet fax" or "Store-forward-fax".
A fax machine supporting T.37 will send a fax to an email address by converting the document to a
TIFF-F image, attaching it to an email (using the
MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message ...
format), and sending the document (using
SMTP
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients ty ...
). The destination fax receives the email and prints the attached document.
To interface with regular fax machines:
* T.37 can be used in conjunction with
fax gateways to communicate with regular fax machines. The fax gateway converts emails to regular faxes or regular faxes to emails.
* A T.37-compliant fax machine includes legacy fax functionality to send to regular fax numbers and requires a phone line for this.
* To find the destination faxes email address, the RFC 4143 standard is in development, which allows a fax machine to use a destination fax number to look up an alternative email address.
See also
*
Unified messaging Unified messaging (or UM) is a business term for the integration of different electronic messaging and communications media ( e-mail, SMS, fax, voicemail, video messaging, etc.) technologies into a single interface, accessible from a variety of ...
*
T.38
T.38 is an ITU recommendation for allowing transmission of fax over IP networks (FoIP) in real time.
History
The T.38 fax relay standard was devised in 1998 as a way to permit faxes to be transported across IP networks between existing Group ...
(Fax over the Internet Protocol)
*
Internet fax
Internet fax, e-fax, or online fax is the use of the internet and internet protocols to send a fax (facsimile), rather than using a standard telephone connection and a fax machine. A distinguishing feature of Internet fax, compared to other Intern ...
External links
Official ITU-T T.37 pageCisco Fax over IP T.37 Store and Forward Fax
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Internet Standards
VoIP protocols
ITU-T recommendations
ITU-T T Series Recommendations