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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Faxes are better than email because you know it didn’t get filtered out from the inbox for some reason.

My employer reports that 99% of the emails it gets are blocked. And many employers are tightening up further to prevent malware attacks.

If I need to send a purchase order, it’s nice to know it was received and have an automatic copy of it without having to think to print a confirmation.

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>Faxes are better than email because you know it didn’t get filtered out from the inbox for some reason.

Not necessarily. I faxed information for a hotel reservation last year, showed up around 9pm on Friday to check in, they apparently hadn't received any of the info, despite having confirmed the reservation and emailing me a confirmation. It ended up being a big hassle. In the end it was because the person working that day hadn't bothered checking the fax machine and it had been thrown away. They were pretty rude about it in the end and never stopped acting like it was our fault. Even after everything was figured out. We finally got into our room at around 11pm after some tense waiting around not being sure where we were going to stay that night.

In that case, though, your fax had indeed been received; it was just thown out after receipt. With an email, there was a good chance it might have never hit the inbox of the receiving party.

From one side or both, faxes usually don’t reach an actual fax machine. eFax has been around for over a decade.

No one is going to notice when the last fax machine is turned off. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a majority of "faxes" sent today never touch a fax machine.

Spam faxes are a huge problem in my experience. It was not worth keeping a fax machine around.

There's at least a federal law on the books that allows for a $200-500 claim against each unsolicited fax.

It was a good enough deterrent for decades, until the recent age of spoofed caller ID. Also, it would be more effective if the claim could be made against the benefactor, not just the sender.

If you give fines based on beneficiary without verifying that the beneficiary actually caused those faces to be sent, a bad actor could bankrupt their competitor by sending a bunch of spam faxes "benefiting" them and waiting for the claims to roll in.

Agreed, although that might be easier to prove/disprove.

Also to be clear, it's not a fine, but a type of civil claim made through the FTC instead of a court. With the main difference being: you receive the spam fax, then you get the $200.

I heard a story about a guy who setup a fax machine in the 90's and used it to print money. He would just wait for spam faxes to come in and then he would research the company and send a form letter he had commissioned from his lawyer. It explained the fee the sender would get from the FCC and offered to settle for half that amount. Rumor is that he lived off of the proceeds for a while.

I've come to appreciate the pragmatic utility of faxing, because many businesses will accept a faxed signature and/or notary stamp in place of a mailed hardcopy.

On the other hand, the image quality is terrible. I'm in a three month long process to recover a check lost due to a fax image quality issue, presumably between two document management systems - a "5" was transmuted to a "6" in a postal address. The receiver of the fax has said it is a clear "6" - I'm not sure if this is due to that well-known glyph-based compression bug in one of the document management systems or something else.

I've also had occurrences of businesses accepting faxes, only to have the person actually doing the work request a higher resolution scan be emailed. Some businesses have moved to plainly announcing the acceptance of scanned documents by email, but really everyone should.

Do you know?

I've worked in places where incoming faxes were automatically converted to pdf and sent as email attachments.

Yes or the alternative:

All faxes pile up in copy room in huge disorganized piles (page 4 of this mixed in with page 2 of that) which no one can disentangle so they are eventually all ignored / thrown away.

It’s funny you say that, because about 15 years ago I setup a fax to email gateway for a payroll department that had to receive 800 faxed timesheets every two weeks and was always losing them.

Still sounds like a procedure problem...

The timesheets have to be digitally signed, printed out, and faxed. Because sanity is totally optional.

Absolutely, for a long the company was too cheap to pay for real time tracking software and the timeclocks.

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