Importance

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Abstract

The invention describes a non-real time fax transmission and reception system, in which fax emulation or 'spoofer' software resides between application software and a fax/modem device. The fax/modem device may be comprised of hardware or software in any proportion. The fax spoofer software uses a fax/modem emulator to interface between requesting application software to have the application software believe that it is communicating with an actual, as opposed to virtual, fax/modem device. The emulator creates a class 1 or class 2 fax/modem session of the transmission request, which may be transmitted to a fax/modem device at a later point in time. Additionally, the fax spoofer software may be used to buffer, queue, or process incoming facsimiles, which can either be stored in the local memory of a fax/modem device or in the memory portion of the fax spoofer software. The incoming facsimile session is recorded in a buffer, and routed to the emulation software that processes the incoming fax/modem session into fax data deliverable to a destination application. Accordingly, incoming faxes need not interrupt the operation of the computing system. Additionally, temporary unavailability of system resources will not result in a termination of the facsimile session or failure of the transmission. The fax spoofer software may be located across several different computers in a networked environment. In a network environment, a fax/modem hub may be created to route incoming or outgoing facsimiles to different client computing systems. Storage or processing of the fax/modem sessions may take place either at the hub level or at the client level.

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First Claim