cathoderaydude posted:

this is very common, and all the operators I've worked with are incompetent and don't know how their black box system works so if a fax doesn't go through, there's nothing you can do about it and not even much chance of knowing it failed

don't get me wrong, you can absolutely live a charmed life about this stuff, many people never have a problem with email to fax, but if you find that there's a specific number you can't send to the only real fix is to get a physical machine and a copper phone line.

plus this requires the source document to be, you know, in the computer. so now you have doctors trying to operate scanners. run for the hills

I'll be perfectly honest I don't think fax deserves the hate it gets. It works fine when you aren't using a compromised phone line and it's one of the most straightforward and accessible technologies given what it accomplishes.

Scanning a document, finding the file, dropping it into an email, then receiving, saving and possibly printing it is a miserable workflow. When you fax something it's like you're handing the page to someone, they just have it, no gd filename prompts. I'm a nerd so I want the file, but there's so much more that can go wrong with email. You can send someone a file and have it be in limbo indefinitely, stuck in some mail server queue or spam filtered. With fax you can call someone and say "hey, do you see it coming through right now" and get a positive response. And despite the riffs, the success rate is really, really high for low page counts.

Agreed on the raccoons though. We hosed that one up, as a species