“A fax or a fax machine is a piece of equipment that was used in the past for copying documents and sending/receiving that information electronically along a telephone line.”
This definition refers us to dinosaur times. But this is so unfair! Even technology historian Jonathan Coopersmith, says it’s still too soon to count the fax machine out entirely.
Together with Coopersmith, we support people who still use faxing and want to prove that it’s not all about dinosaurs and hats with feathers.
By the way, we also know how to make your faxing up-to-date, simple, and beneficial.
Fax without making hard copies
Modern faxing doesn’t require you to add ink to your printer or go searching for a fax machine.
In addition to offering editing services, platforms like PDFfiller provide a faxing service that can produce paper versions of documents without requiring you to actually make a “hard copy”.
With the PDFfiller online platform, you can send any document to any fax machine right from your PDFfiller account.
In particular this means that you’re able to:
- Fax documents to US numbers;
- Set up a fax number to receive faxed documents in your PDFfiller account;
- Receive a fax in your PDFfiller account as a PDF document.
See? We figured out a cool trick. It’s like good old faxing, but you don’t actually need to use any paper.
I don’t use faxing. Should I start?
Of course not. This isn’t a new “must-have” trend – so you can just keep sticking to calmly emailing your digital documents.
But if you’re really interested in why faxing still exists, here are the main reasons:
- People use it, and we can’t exactly forbid them. The legal community, healthcare professionals, the manufacturing industry and the federal government are regular users of fax technology. The thing is that 55% of startups have already adopted a digital business strategy, but traditional enterprises still lag behind – only 38% have adopted such strategies. So there are many corporations that still can’t make that complete digital transformation, which is why they keep processing paper documents.
- Faxing is secure. (Well, at least some people keep considering it secure). The above mentioned spheres deal with sensitive information and require high-level security. In the healthcare industry, many doctors and hospitals still consider fax machines more secure than email for transmitting information protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly called HIPAA. More and more digital platforms provide users with better security, but again, we can’t demand going digital – we can only advise and accompany the willing.
- Paperless faxing! PDFfiller’s ‘Fax’ feature doesn’t require you to use hard copies. Yes, you may fax digital documents to US numbers (in this case the recipient will get a paper version by a fax machine). But what’s even better, you can receive digital versions of paper documents. The last option enables users to transfer and convert hard copies into digital ones, which makes them more secure and convenient to use.
However, don’t get too enthusiastic about faxing. Even the “fax defender” Jonathan Coopersmith, says that the fax machine will never again peak like it did in the glory days of the 1980s. This technology is slowly fading as e-signatures become the norm.
Make your faxing up-to-date, simple, and beneficial with PDFfiller. Get a 30-day free trial
