This question came up after I received a 31 page fax! Should there be a limit?
Oh god yes. I get so tired of people faxing thousands of pages and ruining my ink cartridges because it’s “urgent” and it’s NEVER so urgent you couldn’t just mail the damn thing. We don’t work in a doctor’s office or anything like that.
I regularly fax 24-30 page documents, but I always check with the person first to be sure it’s alright.
It’s really context-specific. There are some folks in legal, for example, who are OK with monstrous faxes. If I were faxing something more than about 10 pages to someone and I didn’t know that they were used to receiving mass quantities of faxes, I’d ask before sending.
As one of those folks in legal, I have to say the sky is the limit for us. When I was in private practice, I used to regularly email 300+ page PDFs and word documents. Faxing not so much, since that really is a PITA for the receiver (and for the sender, since most faxes can’t accept more than about 50 pages for any one transmission). Nowadays as in-house counsel, most of the documents I work with are max. 50 pages, and are always circulated by email.
I have in the past received 100+ page faxes (split into 3 or more separate transmissions), but that was because our server had crashed and we couldn’t send or receive emails and we were trying to close a very large cross-border project financing.
I once received a 34-page fax that was intended for someone else – as in another company – TWICE. Apparently somebody had erroneously plugged MY fax number into speed dial by transposing or mistyping digits. When they thought the fax didn’t go through the first time, they sent it AGAIN.
Took a bunch of phone calls to straighten it out, and I was pretty steamed. Fortunately they compensated me for my trouble, so it was all copacetic in the end.
I am in legal and I generally ask that if they have more than about 20 pages, then I prefer they mail or email it or drop it off.
I regularly send and receive 50+ page documents. Track changes is an Og-send.
Email and fax are two completely different issues.
Fax more than a few pages only with permission.
Email as much as you want.
I faxed a 25 page document this week and didn’t even think twice about it. It really was pretty urgent (not that it ever got a timely reply :rolleyes:) because it involved a company claiming they never received payments that we sent. We just happen to have copies of the cashed checks endorsed with your company name, dingbats. You bet you’re getting that fax.
We don’t usually fax documents that big, though.
I have sent–and received emails of over 100 pages. Almost always to the same person who uses an old Unix mail program that cannot handle attachments. Otherwise I tend to use zipped attachments for really long files.
Faxes, I limit to a few pages.