We still need to fax and receive due to H’s business. For those of you who still fax, what do you use and what does it cost? We are deciding between replacing our old fax machine and going electronic. Are there any pitfalls to electronic? Thanks.
We just changed from our landline fax (cost $135 monthly each for 2 offices) to MyFax for $10 monthly each for 2 offices. We were able to keep our fax numbers so no need to change business cards (hooray!). We get 100 outgoing & 200 incoming pages a month, per office. The hardest part was getting 51 people to set it up on their computers. And the learning curve for the few old timers who don’t quite understand how it works. Saving us a ton annually. We researched beforehand, and were receiving/sending less than 30 pages (TOTAL) monthly.
At home: we have an all in one printer that we can plug into the landline phone jack to send a fax. To receive a fax (which happens less than once a year), we just don’t answer our phone and the transmission is automatically turned into a .pdf by the phone company.
I haven’t sent or received a fax in ages, at least a decade, so curious what prompts needing to fax at all?
If I need to send a version of something, I scan then send electronically. Might that be a solution?
You can use VOIP on the fax and most of the all in one printers can forward and send incoming fax to a work station.
I am going to disconnect all faxes because it’s rarely been used. If I get any thing, it’s spams.
Our all in one printer that we used for faxing died about 5-6 years ago. At first it was a little weird switching to efaxing- I just randomly grabbed some app off the app store. But it works just fine for our rare faxing needs.
I’d imagine for a business it would be hugely more efficient - physical faxing was always prone to errors both on the sending and receiving side. Fax machine not picking, fax not getting all the way through, paper jams on both the sending and receiving side screwing things up, etc. I don’t miss any of that at all.
For the question about who still uses faxes - lots of businesses do, surprisingly. I was dealing with a state agency last year that required faxes. And when sending leasing paperwork for a car, the dealer required faxes. You could efax an image from your end, but on their end it had to physically come out of their fax machine so email wouldn’t work.
Just check the privacy policy and security practices of the e-fax company you plan to use, if the info being faxed is sensitive.
When my company moved to a new office a year and a half ago we did not bring along the old fax machines. I think there has only been 1 or 2 times since then that someone has asked how to fax something and we were able to take care of it with a scan and email.
@doschicos, the Social Security Administration wanted faxes of my son’s paystubs every two weeks. Medical offices also like faxes at times. It’s a pain. We haven’t had a dedicated fax line for many years now.
Do you remember the very first “fax machines”? That had a tube you put the page on? Then the fax came through on thermal paper and the image would fade quickly. Yikes.
I was a property manager at a HUD property before we moved 1½ years ago. I did a re-certification process for each resident every year to see if they still qualified for the rent assistance. I needed to fax questionaires to banks, doctor’s, pharmacy’s and other places for each resident and they needed to fax back. I had 2 fax numbers, one for regular faxing and a special one for the re-certification info. The special one protected the resident’s privacy more and was less likely to be hacked in any way. It cost more per page, so I could not use it for regular faxes.
I imagine electronic faxing would have a harder time protecting privacy in such situations.
“I haven’t sent or received a fax in ages, at least a decade, so curious what prompts needing to fax at all?”
OP obviously needs it for some reason. Like having a major client who insists on getting everything by fax (warranted or not so warranted paranoia over security and not trusting cloud). It is a pain, but I would not dare to tell that client to change their procedures. They will take their business elsewhere, where the service providers will be more than happy to conform to the client’s requirements.
In the 2015 college app cycle, I had to fax FA documents to a couple of colleges that didn’t want them via the CB doc thing. Barnard was one, but there were others. In that case I was faxing tax returns and similar info, so privacy/security were very important.
Legal documents, doctors records, medical records, etc. - many places still use fax for privacy reasons.
I use Metrofax.com, works great, but since it uses email it is not totally guaranteed private. I have not asked them if they safeguard it.
One thing for which I fax to myself is companies which provide me 30-60 pages of forms and lock the doc, in order to edit the packet down to what I need, often my workaround is to fax to myself. The copy to the company is thereby not as pretty, but that’s their fault for being so obsessive. 
We (at work) do not fax very often. When we do, it’s usually because a new vendor needs a copy of a voided check and/or our bank info to set up the account and will request the info be sent by fax.
I don’t have a fax machine in my home office. Sometimes, I will scan the info and send it as a password-protected PDF by email.
Sometimes the receiver has trouble opening up the PW-protected file (I’m not clear why) and will say, can’t you just fax it?
I use fax machine and scanner in my multifunction scanner. I love it. I fax statements to my bookkeeper often. I also fax to others who require it. Some accept scans, some only faxes. It is a great option to have. The printing and copying functions work well also.
@Midwest67 wrote “…can’t you just fax it?..” and I laughed out loud.
My grandmother earned $25 for a true story she sent to the Readers Digest “Life in These United States” column. The premise was that she phoned my then 6 year old to read her a passage a close relative wrote in a letter, which was to my daughter (probably a birthday wish). Anyway grandma started to read the letter and my D interrupted “GG, I’m watching a movie with my friend, can’t you just fax it?” My grandmother took my D out to a lovely dinner with the $ figuring it was 1/2 hers!
Until I read that from @Midwest67 I’d forgotten all about that. ?