Standalone email stations?

ediz

I've tried googling but i'm at something of a loss as to what exactly i'm looking for. I need to find a device that'll basicly simply recieve emails and print them out automaticly (or possibly have some form of simple display screen) without a computer being installed. A broadband connection would be tricky but emails would have to be collected realtime (maybe using GPRS where only the data transferred is charged so it's always on?)

I've seen services which turn emails recieved into faxes but the ones i've run accross are all American and as such it makes the fax costs prohibitive, has anyone come accross something that could manage this or does any solution spring to mind? It seems a fairly obvious use of emails, i'm sure i'm overlooking something blatantly obvious now... :rolleyes:

darraghrogan

We used have a D-Link print server in work that had an email address assigned to it...not only could you print to it using standard file and print sharing smb mechanisms, you could email a plain text mail to it as well.

It was configured to poll a pop3 account every 10-15 mins...

DP-301p was similar to the model number - just plugged into a parallel port printer

Darragh

stevenmu

Maybe a Blackberry would suit your needs, it's basically a mobile phone which does emails too.

ediz

Cheers for the suggestions, i've been having trouble finding a printer with the ability to print emails so i'll have a look at that.

You wouldn't know wether it's possible to hook the blackberry up to a printer would you stevenmu? The main thing is to be able to setup whatever it is and be able to forget about it, and to have it pretty much idiot proof for use by someone with no computer skills, ideally just spitting out printouts of each email.

stevenmu

I'm not sure about the blackberry devices themselves, they may have an IR port which could be used to connect to a printer (many of which have IR ports nowadays). O2 also have some blackberry enabled phones from nokia and siemens, again these may be able to print using IR. There's also blackberry enabled XDA2s and I think these can connect to a USB printer. O2 sale/support could probably tell you for sure what printing options would be available with each device.

Khannie

ediz wrote:

without a computer being installed.

Is this a hard restriction?

Making a computer do this would be easy peasy. 30-60 minutes of perl coding at a guess.

ediz

The (hopeful) idea would be to avoid using computers on site as there'd ninety percent of the time be no one about who had even basic knowledge of them and there'd also be a good chance of it getting damaged.

One possible idea involving scripting that crossed my mind was setting up a single computer to recieve the emails as a server, and then at each site have a fax machine which the server computer would forward the emails to as faxes (say four email addresses for instance, each one scripted to forward to it's own fax machine in four sites).

I'm hazy on scripting but would it be possible to run this from a server pc with broadband and a fax modem, tieing it into outlook rules or the equivalent? (pretty much manually doing what the american companies I stumbled accross offer, email to fax conversion)

zenith

ediz wrote:

email to fax conversion

Hi,

www.relayfax.com is a piece of software that's smart enough to do what you want: it'll turn an email to a fax, etc.

ediz

Aha cheers, seems to be just what i'm looking for, it has a free trial to so i'll have a poke about and see how it works. I'd only ever seen services charging per email/fax and since they were faxing from the US it was fairly pricey.