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Add a printer

Faxart can deliver an inbound fax straight to a physical tray, the way the system it replaces did. Printing is a delivery channel alongside the web inbox and email, so a fax can land in more than one place at once.

The broker submits jobs over SMB to a Windows print server’s queues, as a dedicated print service account. A new delivery channel on the inbound path can fire a print alongside the inbox and email.

flowchart LR
  F[Inbound fax] --> B[Broker]
  B --> Q[Print worker]
  Q -->|smbspool| S[(SMB print server)]
  S --> P[Printer]
  1. Register the print server and its queues (key on the queue name, never the human label, and watch for queues aliased across sites).
  2. Provide the print service account credentials (SAMBA_PRINT_*). It is a dedicated identity, separate from the directory read account.
  3. Map inbound routes to printers so a box’s faxes print automatically.
  4. Test with the built-in test page before relying on it.
  • Admins see all printers with full management.
  • Users see only the printers their boxes route to, plus those printers’ queue (pending/in-flight jobs) and history.

Submitting a job over SMB only confirms the server accepted the bytes, not that paper came out. So Faxart also polls the spooler out-of-band and shows each queue’s real device state: ready, paper jam, toner low, out of paper, or offline. An unreachable server shows as unknown rather than stale-but-healthy.

Printing PHI to a tray is a disclosure, so each printed job is audited as a PRINT event. A failed print is never silently dropped, for a paper-only workflow a lost print is a lost fax, so it surfaces like any other failed delivery.