Anyone still using FAX?

I get lots of SPAM faxes! No legitimate ones however. I long ago opened the top fo the fax machine so it won't answer the phone. Then if someone tells me they are trying to send a fax, I close it.

In my case the fax line isn't costing me anything significant, so I don't care (we use it for voice outgoing calls, all incoming calls go to another set of lines.)

The Customer IS Always Right.

John

Customer Rules:

(1) The Customer IS Always Right.

(2) When the customer is wrong, refer to Rule #1

...Jim Thompson

Yes, the attorneys insist on FAX. At least the ones I have dealt with recently. It's more secure than the internet as the signal goes from your phone to the phone you have dialed. Yes, it can be intercepted, but much less likely than on the internet where every relay can be taped. Also it's much less likely that you will have a virus in your FAX machine.

Al

Edit, Preferences, Security, New. Modify the parameters of New as you will and import your scanned signature as a graphic. You can screw around and combine your photo with your signature in a graphics program, or your company logo, or however you want the graphic to appear. Give this signature field a name you can remember (Thompson's Signature ??).

Then right click on the top toolbar and make sure that Tasks is on. One of the tasks is a pen. Click on the pen and you will be taken through a few checkboxes to be sure that you want to sign. You will draw a box the size you want your signature. Then you are taken to a page that lets you set the reason you are signing the document as well as the selection of the name you chose above for your signature field.

That's it. Now every time you have to sign something, you click the pen, draw the box, tell Adobe what the reason for signing is, and bingo.

Jim

I used to have an attorney that thought like that.

Jim

We're on DSL, so if the Internet goes down, dial tone probably would be gone anyway. :-) (Not that we even have a regular landline -- it's "dry" DSL, and we have cell phones and use Onesuite's VoIP offerings if we're going to talk for hours on-end.)

OneSuite.Com is just going to directly contact the mail server at YourISP.Com directly, so while conceivably someone at your own ISP could readily take a peek, it's be quite difficult for anyone else to do so.

Still, I'd grant you that it is a little surprising that don't have an option to send an encrypted/password-protected PDF, however.

---Joel

I am pretty sure it does. You need to hold the line for just a couple of 'beep's and then it is all ready to take over. I think it is the same as Jeorg has.

Charlie

Mine's a Brother MFC-7820N. Does the job. Well, that plus a few others.

My fax is a modem in my PC.

...Jim Thompson

Usually not. DSL is now quite robust here but it has gone out once in a while. Phone keeps working, so on longer outages I called. Then the techs want you to go through the "Is it plugged in?" and "Please reinstall bla-bla-bla" routines which I politely decline. "No, there are currently no system outages". Then when we walked the dogs I saw a flurry of AT&T trucks and the doors of the big and shiny DSL cabinet flung wide open ...

I don't think I'd ever ditch the land line. And I had my fair share of VoIP phone conferences with companies who had one of those enterprise-level cost-efficient new high faluting phone solutions. The topper was one case where the guys finally said "Hey, let's all whip out our cell phones and call this conference number".

Directly server to server would be quite safe. As long as they guarantee not to send it via the usual Internet channels.

Encryption is rarely used in industry. It's usually me who suggests to use password-protected FTP. A frequent answer is "Hey, great idea", later followed by "Well, our IT guys said we don't have that". So I offer my server and set up a restricted access FTP area for the client.

That'll work. But you also need a scanner to be able to send hand-signed documents.

I love the simplicity of this multi-function device here. You stroll into your office in the morning, coffee in hand, and there's a stack of faxes right next to the door. You don't even have to bend down to get them. Should it ever run out of paper it'll store oodles of pages in memory. If the power goes out on top of that this memory is still there. Try that with a PC.

I don't want to waste toner printing a stack of junk faxes, which grossly outnumber those from customers.

The PC stores faxes on the HDD so if the power were to fail, the data would NOT be lost (well, maybe if it failed during reception). Anyway, power failures are so rare it's hardly worth putting much effort into worrying about them.

In Europe I got those on occasion. Here, not a single one in years. I think you can switch this machine to electronic-only, print-on-demand or something. But it was never necessary.

Provided it does a full self-recovery _and_ clean start of the fax program. Else it won't be able to receive a thing after the power failure.

You don't live in California. But that got much better since the old governor was fired.

We haven't had problems -- although we're just doing simple person-to-person or perhaps three-way calling at most -- but I have read plenty of horror stories about what happens when computer programmers decide to start building telephone systems as well. Still, VoIP has come a long way since its infancy pushing a decade ago now -- it's reasonably mature for "plain old telephone service" these days.

A lot of people who are under, say, 20 today will probably never even bother getting a landline for POTS -- they've had cell phones and Internet via cable/DSL/fiber almost as long as they can remember, after all.

---Joel

Where I work (I'm the computer geek and part-time designer at this factory) and we send and receive FAXes routinely.

The answer is really simple - if you don't want to FAX, don't FAX.

Duh.

You guys sound like you're starting another software pissfest.

Cheers! Rich

That's the internet version of "directly", which isn't particularly direct. The packets can still go through half a dozen networks and a couple of dozen routers before they get to the mail server. And it's not as if there's any real security on the routing protocols.

Duh! I didn't know that ;-)

I've owned a scanner about as long as I have a printer.

Most of them junk.

MY PC never runs out of paper, and I never waste paper on junk faxes ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Not using a service as the delay in receiving a message is annoying, as Tim mentioned.

Here we use a distinctive ring system and a message modem. Costs around $US4 a month for the service/number. The message modem then stores the incoming when the PC is off (or on, for that matter) so if the client does the follow-up call routine I can see from the blinking LED that there are unviewed faxes in the modem memory.

The DR line-routing device cost ~$US20 via ebay (~$60 new).

All this is better than a paper-waster, and the desktop footprint is waaay smaller.