Fax it to you? Seriously?

[d fleming]

I still have people come in once in a while and ask if we can fax something for them or make copies. We are in a rural area but very close to the big city. A lot of these people seem surprised that we don't charge to do that for them, just being neighborly after all. Our desktop is an all in one that still has fax capabilities and it only takes a moment. Most of them come back for small projects or other services we offer, or just insist on at least buying lunch for the shop that day. Seems a lot of them end up having work trucks lettered by us or work shirts printed because we were nice enough to take a minute to help them out.

 

[Baz]

I love my fax machine. Actually its a printer/scanner/fax combo.
As long as it keeps spitting out thousand dollar purchase orders i'll be keeping it.

 

[Billct2]

We still use ours.

 

[Gino]

What's that I hear.......... ?? I think that's about the 10th time this morning I heard the fax sound. Granted, some are just solicitations for vacations, roof repair or life insurance, but 3 were actual orders this morning alone.

Like mentioned....... I like that sound.​

 

[Bobby H]

We still have a fax machine and a dedicated phone number for it.

Fax machines do seem like very obsolete devices that stubbornly refuse to disappear. I feel like they need to go the way of the Pony Express and Morse Code. But there are enough "luddites" who simply got accustomed to using fax machines and don't want to mess around with anything different.

My biggest annoyance with our fax machine: we get a lot of SPAM sent to it. It's lots of fun sifting through the junk pieces of sales solicitation (much of which has nothing to do with our business) to get to the legit documents. The fax spammers often call our regular line, then we have to transfer it to the fax line, receive the document and only then throw it in the trash once we see it is spam. That can waste just as much time as deleting a few dozen pieces of junk email from the inbox. The robo-calls will get you furious after awhile.

We have a number of customers and vendors who send/receive faxes because it's company policy. Some military departments prefer receiving faxes due to security purposes. Can't be too careful these days. One vendor we use got their computer network hosed with ransomware a few weeks ago due to a piece of malicious email. They actually had to pay the criminals a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoins to get their computers unlocked.

In our case I guess we're stuck with keeping our fax line for the time being. It might take yet another step in technological revolution for us to get rid of it.

 

[David Wright]

If I had a land line, would use it for the few who want it.

 

[reQ]

When i started (6 years ago) i did not bother to get a fax line & neve had a problem because i did not have one. People never have problem emailing POs or getting quotes done over email, at least yet

 

[Suz]

I've been sending digital photos of documents for years now. Quite using fax machine close to 5 years ago, I think.
Fax is really the same type of doc (digital scan) as a digital photo. I just put the document under a good light and/or shoot with my flash and zoom in on the document. Usually I send .jpg files, but have sent .pdf files as well. No complaints so far.

 

[chester215]

We still use a fax machine and maintain a dedicated phone # for it.

I don't blame them for not accepting faxes because it may keep the employees from downloading viruses in anonymous attachments which may be open by mistake by an unsuspecting employees.

That only needs to happen to you once for someone to rethink faxing rather than electronic documents.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

I don't blame them for not accepting faxes because it may keep the employees from downloading viruses in anonymous attachments which may be open by mistake by an unsuspecting employees.
That only needs to happen to you once for someone to rethink faxing rather than electronic documents.

Might want to see what protocols you can put into place that would prevent another incident. Especially if you are contemplating the extreme of totally not accepting what is the more common form of communication now.

Totally doing away with email and only accepting faxes would kill my business, so that isn't really an acceptable answer for me. For others, it might be best. It would really depend on who your clientele is. I have never had someone ask for a fax number, so I doubt I have any customers that require that form of communication.

I can understand to a point that argument above, but by putting in better controls that would help mitigate what goes on. Keep mission critical computers away from the internet and keep computers that are on the internet away from the local network.

Make sure all computers have anti virus software to run on incoming files before they get into the local network. That would mean antivirus software no matter what PC OS you run. Yes, Linux and Mac can also get malware as well. Statistically not as likely for a variety of reasons, but they can still get it or if nothing else be a typhoid Mary and affect your Windows machines if they have access to the local network that is run with Windows machines.

Another bad habit that I see is that typically Windows users run as full admin all the time. Windows machines are kinda clunky compare to Unix type machines. Even if there is only one user for a Windows rig, you need to setup 2 accounts. One admin with a very strong password and then your standard user account that you do everything through. Most Windows users only run in one account with no password. That doesn't help matters.

 

[chester215]

We have not yet downloaded any viruses from attachments and probably 1% of our customers still use a fax machine.
I send and receive email attachments/ proofs via email all day, couldn't do my job without them.
Just saying that I understand their position.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

We have not yet downloaded any viruses from attachments and probably 1% of our customers still use a fax machine.
I send and receive email attachments/ proofs via email all day, couldn't do my job without them.
Just saying that I understand their position.

I am sorry, I was talking the generic you, not necessarily you specifically. More in terms of those that did do away with email for that exact reason listed.