I sent one two days ago to a Korean company whose website had no mention of an email address, just a phone and fax number.

I sent it overnight from my HP printer/scanner/photocopier/fax, and next morning I had a return email from the company.

Now you have their email address.

Last time I sent a fax would have been at least 5 years ago, perhaps 10.

Last time I sent a fax would be a few weeks ago. A semi regular occurance at work.


Ben

Fax is still very commonplace in certain industries because (for reasons unknown) it is viewed as more secure than e-mail. It's a silly notion and quite lacking in fact. E-mail can be encrypted in the same way this website is and whilst it is technically possible to break encryption it is much easier to punch in the wrong fax number and send one's material to an unknown destination.

Fax machines are also susceptible to fax spam. It wastes your paper and your electricity and what's more, you cannot control it.

I once published a list of companies that were sending fax spam to the machine in my office at a previous employer and send each of these companies a copy of the list and told them they were just wasting their time and my paper. Those few that replied gave me the delusional, "it's not us sending it but our business partners and we have no control over what they do" yarn. Some of the companies involved in fax spam are otherwise leading and reputable companies which we'd all know well.

It's time the fax machine went the way of the dodo bird. They are potentially useless contraptions with poor graphics and they cannot multitask.

Fax machines are also susceptible to fax spam.

Prior to the Korea experience, the last faxes I sent were in 2015 when I sent 2 to small American sellers who also didn't publish email addresses.

When I asked one of them why, he said he got too much spam in his inbox.

I recall the days of fax spam, often from sellers of fax machine supplies.

One thing that bloke forgot is that e-mail spam, whilst far more rampant than any other form of spam, is easily controlled, though not always cheap. Because I own internet domain names (there's two just for this site but I also have others for my DNS name servers and a primary domain for my mail server) I get absolutely hammered with spam and I mean anything up to 200 messages per day but on average around 100. It's the usual crap - penis enlargements, cures for cancer, diabetes and weight loss remedies, discounts for drugs, none of which are available over the counter in Australia which means it'd be illegal to purchase them anyway and click bait for phishing scams.

At the moment, rules in Outlook just delete this nonsense when it downloads but I am about to go one better. This year, in the next few months, I am building two new servers, one for this website and another to manage mail and DNS. The latter will include the Professional version of the mail server software I use and includes a full suite of weapons to nail spam with. Once fine tuned it will simply reject any hostile message without downloading it from the sender's mail server.

More than half the e-mail traffic on the Internet is spam or otherwise unwanted content. Sadly, the only ones not paying for the huge amount of bandwidth this traffic uses are the spammers.

I had a mate (over 20yrs ago) who, if he got fax spammed, would set up a printed toilet roll feeding into his fax machine and after close of business send the toilet roll to whoever was annoying him!

I hope for the sake of his machine that there weren't any skid marks on it!

On a more serious note though, it's not a bad idea if it can be done without jamming the transport mechanism. Especially if there's someone writing "stick your fax spam up your Khyber pass" on it repeatedly.

Fax still popular in some East Asian countries because their non-alphabetic scripts are not friendly to touch-typing on a keyboard, so keyboard skills are much less common than here. Older users are most unlikely to be keyboard literate, but can send a handwritten fax. It is slowly changing with the younger generation, who use keyboard or more likely touch-screen systems that translate alphabetic hint characters into a choice of possible intended graphic characters, using predictive sorting logic.

This problem was first addressed in the days of the morse telegraph. The British ran the Chinese telegraph system in the early days, and it operated by transmitting a four-digit numeral code to represent the index number of each graphic character in the dictionary. Hardly instant communication, but a lot better than anything else at the time.

As a secondary benefit, the telegraph code was also used to provide the organising index for printed dictionaries - the first linear sorting arrangement that had existed in Chinese dictionaries (which had never been phonetically sorted).

Maven

Brad, our business (software and hardware development) has run our own email server pretty much forever. Our last internal email system was Novell Groupwise. About 8 years ago we switched to Gmail for business.

We keep all existing domains and email addresses but get NO SPAM! Don't have to do any maintenance on it either. It just works.

We have the know-how, bandwidth, server resources etc. in house but Gmail really does make it unnecessary.

Only disadvantage is you can't attach executable files. So we just include a link to the file (stored somewhere else) instead.

Would never go back!

As it happens I sent a fax yesterday, by their request, to a large hospital.

The hospital I work at still uses fax for exchange of certain medical documents - there's a perception that it is more secure than e-mail. In some ways it probably is - most e-mail traffic is not encrypted although on the down side it is just as easy to dial a wrong fax number as enter an incorrect e-mail address.

On another note, does anyone remember the days of fax machines printing on thermal paper? Dreadful devices and unless the faxes were photocopied soon after the print would fade or the page would turn black with time, depending on how the pages were stored.

remember the days of fax machines printing on thermal paper?

Yep, and the foul smell of ozone that accompanied them.

One thing about faxed documents that used to drive me crazy was when the sender had used highlighter pen on the original and the faxed copy thus looked like a redacted document from ASIO.

I am at work now & I just received a fax!!

We still send & receive faxes for internal communication. My work place has many locations throughout metro Melbourne all linked by a five digit PABX phone system.

What is a fax??? Fone And Xerox .

Haven't sent one since I had WIN98SE though I did have to connect a fax machine to a phone line at an employment business's office earlier this year. I was the beneficiary of one recently when my GP faxed a script to my pharmacy and two days ago had to ring the Passport Office to get a fax number (it wasn't shown on the website) for a refugee acquaintance who needed to fax a form.