Send Form Results to Fax Machine

[brklynGuy]

hi! i'm new here, and hoping someone might have some suggestions. i am building a web site for a restaurant. they would like a form on the web site for making reservations to the restaurant. because there is no computer at the web site, they would like the form to send the reservation request to their fax machine.

the site is hosted by godaddy. they told me that i would need to purchase something that they call "fax thru email". when the user clicks the submit button, the form information is supposed to be sent to an email as a text attachment, which will forward it to the fax machine (using the "fax thru email" service).

i am by no means an expert in php (i'd like to be, but i'm new to this), but i have managed to modify some scripts to send a form to an email address. what i have not been able to do is figure out how to send the information of a form as a text attachment to an email address.

does anyone have any suggestions in how i can do this?

basically, i need to send the information on a form to the fax machine at the restaurant.

thank you so much and happy new year!
--robbie--

[jpr]

It is possible to create a php form that would send an email with the data as an attachment. Unless the email is somehow sent to the fax machine, this could be a problem. You might need to purchase a service or gateway. Somehow the fax machine would need to be called. Now if you can somehow send emails directly to the fax machine, than this is not a problem.

Jason

[brklynGuy]

i'm not sure. the guy at godaddy said that we would have to purchase their "fax thru email" add-on, which i did. but he said that the info from the form will have to be sent as a text attachment to the email that we set up for the "fax thru email". it is my understanding that by sending the form input as an attachment to the email address, it will forward to the fax machine. does that make sense?

i also found this thing: http://www.tpc.int/faxbyemail.html which seemed pretty straight-forward. i tried using this address format with a form-to-email script that i found. but for some reason, it didn't seem to work when i tried this. do you know of a way to get this to work? it seems like it would be more direct without having to go to an email address, and then being forwarded to the fax machine.

but if the "fax thru email" thing can work, that'd be fine. in order for that to work though, it seems that the form has to be converted to text and sent as an attachment to the email address.

thanks for your response!
--robbie--

[brklynGuy]

anyone have any suggestions on how to do this?

thanks!
--robbie--