Reason: Because there is no equivalent for TCP/IP that "just works".
The fax use case is: a businessperson needs to walk to a machine, lay a stack of 50 sheets down, punch in an address and let the machine do the rest. Oh, so you say some scanners/copiers can email? Let's go over the problems with email.
- dealing with attachments
- attachment filetype; no enforceable standard by the recipient
- inboxes overflowing
- smtp servers rejecting messages over a certain unknown size
- mailserver administration
- chews through Internet bandwidth; no built-in throttling
- spam
- spam false positives, dropped messages
- no ability to reliably confirm delivery
- recipient has to print document, for full fax simulation
I'm actually amazed there has been no Internet standard that has emerged for this: pushing a large document in some standard format to an Internet-connected client computer (laptop or desktop, not dedicated server) for immediate viewing/printing. The cynic in me says the anti -P2P movement had a lot to do with it, since a P2P file transfer is about as close as we have to fax functionality (albeit with some problems of its own). There are obviously many ways to cobble together HTTP, FTP, SFTP, XMPP, etc. to imitate this use case, but none really come close to the plug-it-in-and-hit-start ease of fax machines.
In my experience, analog fax has been neither problem-free nor spam-free, even with a solid fax machine over POTS. Feed errors, pages turned the wrong way, machine running out of memory, feed or print jams, poor quality, power loss, etc, have all contributed towards fax headaches.
Email works significantly better than fax: it just appears to have more problems due to volume of electronic mail.
You make it sound like faxes are infallible. Every time I've had to send somebody one, we've had to cycle through several iterations before it actually worked - Ah, looks like I need to dial 9 to get an outside line. Oh, your fax machine isn't switched on right now? Still nothing? Ok, read me your fax number again one more time. Oh crap, I put the documents in upside down...
Sure. But you send faxes how often? A few times a year? If you're sending faxes all the time and you know how to do it, they're mostly pretty reliable. This is especially true within narrow communities of companies who use it all the time (like the legal and financial sectors).
There are definitely electronic forms of contracts that are legal without me ever having to put an ink pen on a dead tree.
I bought car insurance from Geico entirely online. Never signed anything or faxed anything. Just typed in my initials and checked some boxes ... only thing I had to print was the card that goes in my glove box.
That depends on the locality and given the spate of e-signature legislation in the early 2000s, I would say that's no longer true for the majority of U.S. states. I can't speak for Canada.
I can say on good authority, as I paid lawyers good money for the legislation ( http://tinyurl.com/3xwvf5a ) and pertinent case-law research, that (commercially) emails with e-sigs in VA are just as good, in some cases, MUCH better than faxes due to the header meta-information.
What constitutes an "e-sig" under the Commercial Code of Virginia can also be very simple (nothing more than a "/s/ <full name> <title> <date>" line in documents) provided that both parties agree apriori that "sufficient notice" can be given over email.
Given the pace of business these days, to a first-order approximation, we simply won't do any kind of volume work with a client, vendor, or partner that doesn't support electronic document authorization. Faxes really are dinosaurs. We still maintain a dedicated fax line, but to my knowledge, it's not be utilized for over 4 years.
I work for a company that does a large volume of business with small, independent trucking companies. This requires sending load confirmation and bill of lading documents that they must have with them in the truck.
Many of these barely have a working fax machine, much less email. We email documents directly whenever we can, and have abstracted faxing away using a print-to-fax server, and incoming faxes to emails.
Things have changed quite a bit in the past few years; I would estimate we have close to 50% email adoption among independent truckers. Even still, our systems send hundreds of faxes a day at peak time.
I use pay-as-you-go online fax services when I'm required to file something. You know how I get the signature on it? Export whatever the document is to PDF, turn the signature page into a GIF using ImageMagick ("convert file.pdf[0] sign-here.gif"), open the GIF in my image editor and copy/paste a signature block I keep in Dropbox, and then re-export to PDF. Nobody can tell because by the time it comes out of their fax it is going to look like garbage anyhow, and any imperfection in the pasting process just looks like a fax artifact. If I wanted to go for extra authenticity I'm sure ImageMagick has some combination of parameters which will make it look like it was copied six times on a Xerox that hasn't been serviced since the 1970s prior to being faxed.
As a bonus if you already use any serious VoIP provider, you might want to check their offer. Even if it's not that popular / advertised, many of them do offer fax2email and email2fax services. Just check whether they're using T.38 (otherwise you'll get a lot of failed transmissions).
Printing shit out to sign it and fax it just to capture a signature is bizarre, especially for documents that were created/revised via email.
I just feel absurd for doing this while I work at the epicenter of technology in order to put a little cash into a startup that wants to go revolutionize some other part of the internet or technology or whatever.
I may as well be rubbing sticks together to start a fire.
Part of a message I sent my mother, wherein I went off on a fax machine tangent:
"[ ... ] can we all finally agree that fax machines are a bad idea? I print a digital document from my computer onto a sheet of paper, perhaps scribble something on it, then stick it into this machine that scans it back into a digital document for transmission. It's then sent somewhere else in order to be printed onto a sheet of paper, which is then handed to some minimum-wage drone who has to type all the stuff back into a digital document so that the information can be dealt with and archived on the other end. Seriously. What the hell is up with that?"
I've been waiting for Google to help with this since their voice program came around. These business that charge to do fax->email conversion were great, but from my understanding the most expensive part of this was getting the numbers reserved. Google doesn't charge for their voice service, so it would seem they could provide this service to everyone with a google voice number.
I don't think anything is going to kill the fax any time soon. But Google could easily make its existence much less annoying--which may just be the first phase of its death.
Immediate solution: Scan your signature and use an email/web - fax service
Better answer:
I've thought about this problem a lot. I think the concept of the fax machine itself isn't really the issue, it's the fact that it hasn't evolved from communicating via a 19.2K modem over POTS lines. All the alternatives are replacement technologies that don't offer a migration path from the established standard and make it harder to replicate a physical document from A to B.
- The fax via email/web alternatives are harder to use because scanning and printing are separate and often difficult steps.
- FOIP isn't trivially backwards compatible - you need a gateway provider and a service agreement to send to existing machines.
I think Google's cloud print service need to extend to cloud scanning. As a first step you could then have multifunction scanner/printer/copiers that attempt to contact the recipient via IP first and then either fall back to regular fax or use a proxy fax service. IP connections would offer: higher speed, higher resolution, colour, encryption and wireless connectivity.
The key is something that's still as easy as a fax machine. Any solution that doesn't focus on copying physical documents is solving a different problem. We already have email for that.
Some places that wouldn't accept a simple email that they print will accept the more direct analogue of a fax: I scan a signed page and email them the scan. When they print this at their end this is 100% indistinguishable from a fax; not to say that there aren't places that will balk just to resist all change, but this version of change may seem a lot less foreign than e-signatures, more of a natural evolution.
I'm not objecting to packages, etc. But why do people still send me letters? If the IRS, employers, clients, etc., moved to fax I'd be happy. Fax has been around for 30-40 years and for some reason I keep mailing letters to people.
Extension of that... why can't I have a permanent address?
Why can't I have something that, when provided to USPS, FedEx, UPS, whatever, resolves to wherever I'm currently living? Every time I move I have to change a million different addresses with a million different people, invariably forgetting some along the way.
My email address never changes - why can't my physical address be like it.
There is no "global mail infrastructure" to support a symbolic address—the meaning of an address is legally defined by the city/state/country it is sent to. You could have an address that would stay constant as you moved around a city (and they have them: P.O. Boxes), but when you moved to a different country, you'd end up playing by someone else's rules. It's like asking every country to standardize on what they print/stamp on their currency.
I think it's even weirder that for so long I couldn't get a permanent phone number (thanks Google Voice!). I mean the phone network is pretty much the same as a computer network. They figured out how to automate the switching, but the phone companies never took the next step to automate the directory lookup and number resolution process. I've often wondered why there isn't something like dns for phone numbers. Probably because of myriad spam/trust/security issues. Those issues may be similar to the ones keeping physical addresses from making the leap too.
I'm sorry... electronic signatures are NOT VALID for any kind of overseas contracts (if you live in the US - here in Uruguay they are basically useless too).
Until the law (and custom) catches up, we'll be faxing stuff. And I should know, as I've tried to kill fax at several companies, only to be held back by the legal department.
At my current company (an insurance company), we hold as valid requests for policy renewal faxed in, or on a printed form, but due to the legal requirements we cannot accept any other electronic format, sadly (which would help greatly with automation). Legal dept. wants something that judges will accept as valid on contract disputes.
Email is not an appropriate solution for many of the things faxes are used for. Sending private information from one business to another. Faxes routinely contain credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.
Every business has a fax machine, many still do not have email. I work with a lot of hotels, a large number of them do not have email, business is conducted via fax as it is the only option.
Huh? I don't know where this comes from. 10 years ago you'd need a SCSI card and a several hundred dollar scanner to get decent (e.g. 300dpi or above) scans, and it'd take many minutes to scan a single page, not counting any technical troubles. Now you can buy a USB 2.0 scanner for much cheaper and get higher resolution, higher quality scans much, much faster.
I think the moment we get in-built scanners into laptops, fax machine's days will be numbered. Until then, it will remain super difficult to scan a document at home(when scanner is at work) or struggle with drivers of the scanner etc.
The fax use case is: a businessperson needs to walk to a machine, lay a stack of 50 sheets down, punch in an address and let the machine do the rest. Oh, so you say some scanners/copiers can email? Let's go over the problems with email.
- dealing with attachments
- attachment filetype; no enforceable standard by the recipient
- inboxes overflowing
- smtp servers rejecting messages over a certain unknown size
- mailserver administration
- chews through Internet bandwidth; no built-in throttling
- spam
- spam false positives, dropped messages
- no ability to reliably confirm delivery
- recipient has to print document, for full fax simulation
I'm actually amazed there has been no Internet standard that has emerged for this: pushing a large document in some standard format to an Internet-connected client computer (laptop or desktop, not dedicated server) for immediate viewing/printing. The cynic in me says the anti -P2P movement had a lot to do with it, since a P2P file transfer is about as close as we have to fax functionality (albeit with some problems of its own). There are obviously many ways to cobble together HTTP, FTP, SFTP, XMPP, etc. to imitate this use case, but none really come close to the plug-it-in-and-hit-start ease of fax machines.