Determining if a received fax is an auto-reply for a transmitted fax

A fax machine comprising:

• a scanning section for scanning hard copy documents to be sent as fax;
• a printing section for printing received fax documents;
• a communication interface section for transmitting and receiving fax documents;
• a user interface section for receiving user input;
• a memory for storing a computer readable program code and data;
• and
• a processing section for executing the computer readable program code stored in the memory to control the fax machine to perform a process which comprises:
• (a) performing optical character recognition on the image to extract textual content of the received fax document;
• (b) determining whether a sender of the received fax document is identical to a receiver of any faxes sent by the fax machine within a predefined time period before a time of receipt of the received fax document;
• (c) determining whether the received fax document contains only one or two pages;
• (d) detecting keywords indicating an auto-reply in the extracted textual content;
• (e) detecting keywords indicating a received status in the extracted textual content;
• (f) determining whether the received fax document is an auto-reply based on the determination and detection results in steps (b) through (e);
• and
• (g) when the received fax document is determined not to be an auto-reply, printing the fax document, and when the received fax document is determined to be an auto-reply, taking an alternative action.