As long as we keep getting large orders from certain customers via fax, we aren’t going to unplug the fax machine.
I think us haters should meet up in a field and go all Office Space on a couple fax machines. We would all feel better.
One thing that baffles me is how the fax-haters serenely insist that email is a completely reliable, trouble-free technology. I can’t begin to count the number of times an email has bounced back to me for some inscrutable reason, or has disappeared into some black hole. I’ve also had people tell me “I can’t open your attachment,” which leads to a lot of wearisome back-and-forth about PDF readers and default programs. Oh, and who hasn’t received an email that says, “The document is attached,” but there’s no attachment because the sender forgot to attach it? Or maybe some spam filter decided that the attachment looked suspicious and decided to nuke it. I’ve experienced all of these things.
Anyone who has never, ever had a problem with emails or attachments has been extraordinarily lucky, IMO.
I made this point back in post # 30. As far as I know, none of the anti-faxers have responded to it.
I always get a confirmation that a fax has been received.
Not so for e-mails.
Faxing will survive in law offices until there is always a confirmation that every e-mail sent is received, regardless of the e-mail system of the recipient.
For instance, I never get a confirmation back when I send an e-mail to a gmail account. The most I get is a message that the r-mail has been relayed to the server. That’s useless for proving the recipient has actually received it.
Received, but not necessarily viewed. If the recipient’s machine is out of ink or paper, the sender will not know about either.
I don’t “hate” faxes (except junk ones). Faxing is just one of several ways to communicate, and I use most of them frequently. Each has their advantages.
In terms of relative advantage, I put it somewhere between message in a bottle and carrier pigeon. 