Is it Time to Ditch the Fax Number?
The precursor to the modern fax machine was patented in 1843. Business fax technology caught on widely in the mid-1970s. So why, thirty years later, are those of us on the cutting edge still wasting our time wrestling with (and paying for) ways to hook into this last-generation network for sending around images of paper documents?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but over the last decade I’ve been through a ridiculous number of alternatives in my search for a workable fax solution:
- PC fax cards
- Dedicated fax machines
- Outlook add-in software
- Online fax-to-email gateways
Every one of these things has ended up requiring time, expense, and configuration. Meanwhile, I’ve been sending and receiving fewer and fewer faxes every years, as even my least up-to-date clients have managed to migrate themselves largely to e-mail. Maybe there are some industries where the fax machine remains an essential tool, but the sort of consulting I’m in doesn’t seem to be one of them.
So, I believe this is the year that I’m finally going to pull the plug on this piece of 19th-century technology. I’ll remove one bit of contact info from my business cards and signature block, and make myself that much simpler to contact. If I simply must send a fax to someone still living in the last generation, there’s always FaxZero. And if a customer asks for my fax number, I’ll tell them I’m not reachable by carrier pigeon either.
Am I crazy? Do you still find fax availability worth paying for?
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I agree! In fact, I had new cards printed and nixed the FAX number. I feel so contemporary.
OneSuite offers an inbound fax number for $1 a month, which is about all I find it to be worth. Faxes come straight into your email. You can use your normal landline to send them out.
The reason fax technology has survived is that luddites who refuse to use modern methods of communication are looked on as distinguished, or traditional, rather than as idiots. The next time someone asks you for a fax number, ask him if he will be making his next visit to your office by horse :P
Ditch it. VP at a software company, working remotely 3-4 weeks per month, sending/receiving contracts and other documents requiring signatures and I do it via scanner. If someone can’t e-mail something to me, I feel A-OK about leaving it as their problem.
In fact, this article has made me feel motivated to throw away my (disconnected) fax machine.
I don’t pay for my fax number, but as I have to have a landline to have ADSL I put a fax machine on it. It’s a thermal one, I certainly don’t use it enough to buy a plain paper fax machine.
I would love to be able to do this, however, my biggest supplier has two delivery options, fax or snail mail. I am tied to what they will do. I have given up my dedicated fax line and fax machine, and use myfax for all incoming faxes.
Right now I use MyFax.com, but only to receive signed freelance contracts. I’m also going to look at Echosign, which offers a free option and digital signatures, which is about all I need.
I used to use my computer and scanner to send and receive faxes until my scanner died and I ditched my land line.
I have to keep my fax number on my business card because I use it so rarely that I don’t have it memorized!
I’m using a free eFax number for receiving faxes. I’ve had this service (did I say FREE) for more than seven years. People fax from their machines, and I get the fax as an e-mail attachment.
eFax charges for sending faxes, so I don’t send through them. I send the few faxes (maybe a dozen a month) through the built-in fax driver in Windows. (I’m using XP.) These few faxes go out over my telephone line/modem.
I rarely print anything faxed to me, unless a signature is required.
To make it most simple for myself, (especially since I send less faxes than I receive… I email everything) I signed up for PFax aka Packetel. It’s 3.95 per month, and you can receive unlimited emails, and they are forwarded to up to two inboxes.. I’ve never had any problems and I have been using the service for several years now. I def. have pushed the envelope on volume. If you are interested in signing up, use promotion code hwmvd24085 as they have a nice referral service… aka you and I both get a free months worth of service.
As far as sending faxes.. I just use Faxzero.com Their service allows me to send 2 faxes a day for free (per email address), up to 3 pages.. I just go to their webpage, upload the doc and send. I don’t have to have an account or anything. If I need to send a large fax, they require you to pay $1.99. My experience has gone pretty well.. the only time I had a problem, they sent me a credit for 2 free “premium” faxes.. and the problem was my clients fax machine was turned off..
I still use the fax on a regular basis. But I use my cell phone as my only phone. I sometimes have to send out contracts to people who don’t know what an email address is, let alone a cell phone. I also have a FREE efax number that I use infrequently (sp).
Occasionally use a fax machine to send a signed document somewhere but really most of these could go overnight in the post without any negative consequences. I hate faxes though. You can never be sure that its arrived at the other end legible so you end up phoning the recipient to check in which case you might as well just phone and tell them instead of sending the fax in the first place.
I haven’t advertised a fax number for a while, but… it’s often easier to contact someone you don’t know personally via their company fax number than get a personal email address.
Note to editor: We live in the 21st Century, fax machines are from the 20th Century, not the 19th century. Don’t worry, stick around the Internet, we will bring you into the 21st Century. Sonrier.
Fax may seem old school but eFax still has 11m users and is growing very nicely.
Fax is pretty old school in fact for transporting documents. Email has killed that for sure. But when a document needs to be signed, or marked-up, fax is not as bad a choice. In that case, if you combine it with some electronic fax service which delivers the faxes as PDFs or TIFFs, it in fact also acts as the poor man’s/ubiquitous scanner. Which is in fact pretty handy — rather than old school.
I ditched fax a long time ago. For all you sending out signed contracts, take a look at Echosign (I am not related to them).
I don’t have a fax or even a landline phone. I use a mobile phone and wireless internet and email almost everything. Two things I hate: when a web form requires me to fill in a landline number before submitting, and when I go to the dentist/optometrist/accountant/anyone and they check over my details to make sure they are up to date and then ask “Have you got a landline number yet?” What do you mean, “yet”??? Perhaps next time I’ll enquire after the health of their carrier pigeons…
Hi,
Semi-regular reader/lurker with a completely OT question – I’d like to ask other WWD’ers about their experiences with various online timecard/bookkeeping solutions (I am in need of one, and haven’t found anything satisfactory yet.)
Is there a thread here that discusses the subject? I searched the archives for a few minutes but couldn’t find anything. Is there perhaps a separate forum here where I could ask about something like this, or may I request a thread on the topic?
Thanks in advance!
@thelocomono: Fax machines came about in the latter half of the 1800s
My suppliers and I must still be in the stone age. I’m afraid I’ll be hanging onto my web-fax service. If I ditch it, my suppliers won’t be able to accept payment authorization from me. Oh well, it’s only $9.95 a month.
Have you tried signing a word document on screen?
Until there is a bulletproof and really easy/available option for digital signatures then the fax number will always be around.
Unfortunately for some of us the fax is not dead. I work in Construction and the two main peices of technology we use are the Mobile Phone and the Fax Machine. There is definitely a lot more emhapsis on email these days but faxing is far from dead.
Our Mac software company has a fax program called PageSender. As we got ready to release a brand new version last month, I surveyed our user base because I really wanted to know: “Why are you still faxing? What’s wrong with email?” I mean, I’m glad they are buying our product, but I really wondered why. :-)
So why do they?
1) They work in a medical-related field and are required to use faxes, which are HIPAA compliant, vs. email which is not.
2) The legal profession is also not completely comfortable with using email for confidential materials.
3) They work in a field with a lot of images on paper (construction, architecture) and it would be unwieldy to scan everything in to email, not to mention the large file sizes involved.
So I think the fax is with us for the foreseeable future, until laws are updated, email is made more secure, and scanning is easier.
You can read more about it in an interesting article in TidBITS.
I come across clients who love to use them for contracts etc, so I use my VoIP providers e-fax service… Faxing isnt going to go away soon, alot of people still insist on using it..
1) Fax machines will be around for awhile. Not all locations have digital means but they do have land lines.
2) Digital senders (secure and nonsecure) have replaced many fax machines but see #1.
3) Most groups have VOIP (secure and nonsecure) but even if own everything that data goes though the system will still go down, so many keep land lines see #1 & #2.
Note: The above will only be true if you do work in a global environment and have be able to send and recieve 24/7 without any downtime. Even then most groups will own or lease space based communications platforms but even that can have issues.
The way to get signatures into the office or a client, is to print the document (assuming it was emailed in the first place), sign it, scan it, and email it back in jpg or pdf versions. A scanner is much more useful these days than a fax machine.
It’s easy to be flippant, but in the real world with real people you need fax capability.
You need it for W-8 and W-9 forms from your contractors. If you’re hiring writers, you’re going to come across people who are extremely non technical. You need it for contracts. We deal with supposedly tech-savvy Web 2.0 companies that need to send faxes for insertion orders. Just because the company is tech doesn’t mean the sales, marketing, and biz dev people are tech savvy, and they may be off-site contractors to the company and not able to get help from the techies, who are probably busy with other stuff anyway.
We use eFax. It costs a monthly fee, $20 I believe. Otherwise, it requires no time or effort on our part. The give us a local area code. Faxes come via PDF attachment. If we need to “scan” something to fax, we just use a digital camera.
The “we don’t have a fax machine” story just sounds lame to outsiders. If you don’t mind appearing as a starving freelancer, fine, but if you’re trying to project an image as a stable company, a “big store con,” if you will, you need a fax number.
For me faxing is absolutely essential for receiving signed contracts from my clients. I don’t see what the hassle is though, I just signed up for an online service and get an email when someone sends me a fax. No set up at all besides inputting my credit card number.
You make some points shared by a lot of people, but the fact is that faxes are crucial and the Internet Fax marketing is growing at a VERY rapid pace. Companies are replacing fax servers and the business is huge. You cannot overcome the need for legal documents to be faxed and the fact that there are large numbers of folks not using the Internet at all.
Examples are:
Mom and pop construction industry companies for faxing orders, etc.
Car dealerships faxing loan applications.
It is easy to say and you certainly can let it go, but you will need a fax number eventually and you will need to send a fax. Until the fax is replaced in hearts and minds, it does not matter how many alternative methods of communication are available.
On more thing for those saying they can scan and not fax, it is still sending a facsimile. You are faxing. You just are not using a “fax machine” per se, but you actually are….;)
For more info on this industry, check out my blog that covers it – FaxChronicle.com
If someone had told me 4 years ago that for the last 2 years I would have been a fax industry executive, I would have laughed them out of the room. Now….?
I got a kick out of the whole fax number thing the other day. I was talking to a company about setting up a payment gateway for an web site and they insisted on faxing me the information. I told them that I don’t have a fax line. They told me that they could fax it to my bank. I told them that was a good half hour drive away. I then suggested that they e-mail it. They said they couldn’t. I told them I’d get back to them (I didn’t).
This is supposed to be a company who’s bread and butter is web workers… and they’re insisting on using a fax machine? What?
gotta say, I tossed my fax machine months ago but I’m with the payment gateway company because it’s about infosec. They interface between banks and commerce constantly so they can’t afford even a single hack.
I e-mail and upload virtually all my proofs and graphics work… but I would try not to do that with banking information or anything that had private info.
Internet=Public Bathroom. You never know who’s watching
A SSL site for online banking is one thing, but there are too many doors between my e-mail box and the senders to guarantee anything other than a password protected pdf might be safe; and then of course you’d have to know the password. Of course this leads to the interesting question of how secure e-fax services really are …
I use my client’s application – http://www.scanr.com. It is a service that lets you use a camera phone to send faxes. Actually, my wife who works from home uses it more than I do (for faxing) as she is in an industry that still relies on paper trails. If someone needs to ‘fax’ you something you still need to have an account set up with eFax (or another service) to receive.
i agree …
we should loose the bulky fax machines for good …
it doesnt serve much purpose …
its a relic …
====++++++ yeah. gotta throw them fax machines! i’m with 101fax…if you’ve heard about it. i’m very much satisfied with their service compared with those i’ve signed up before. i can even fax broadcast!!! talk about technology. the monthly fees are really LOW. http://www.101fax.com — you gotta try it. ====++++++
http://www.GotFreeFax.com is another website that allows user to send free fax online to the US and Canada. User can either upload a PDF/Word file or enter text to fax. It does not add Ads to user’s fax, which makes it suitable for faxing formal documents.