The Network Fax Working Group is chartered to explore issues involved with the transmission and receipt of facsimilies across TCP/IP networks and to develop recommended standards for facsimile transmission across the Internet. The Group is also intended to serve as a coordinating forum for people doing experimentation in this area to attempt to maximize the possibility for interoperability among network fax projects. Among the issues that need to be resolved are what actual protocol(s) will be used to do the actual data transmission between hosts, architectural models for the integration of fax machines into the existing internet, what types of data encoding should be supported, how IP host address to phone number conversion should be done and associated issues of routing, and development of a gateway system that will allow existing Group 3 and Group 4 fax machines to operate in a network environment. It is expected that the output of the Working Group will be one or more RFC's documenting recommended solutions to the above questions and possibly also describing some actual implementations. The life of the Working Group is expected to be 18-24 months. It is also hoped that some fax vendors, as well as the networking community and fax gateway developers, will be brought into the effort.