Sending a Fax on Broadband

Faxes, remember those? When was the last time you sent one? Personally, I cannot even remember. 99.9% of the people I work with and for have the tech savvy to receive a PDF, a jpg scan of a document or just a plain text email. That is with the exception of one particular section of the government, which insisted on fax for “security and legal reasons”.

Quite bizarre, it would be much harder to fake the documents they required if they were genuine scans than a blurry black and white smudge of a document that was common with fax machines the last time I looked. Trouble is, I’m on cable broadband, I don’t have a fax machine, and I’m not even sure my new-ish laptop actually has an old-fashioned v.90 modem (remember when v.90 seemed to be like having nitrous in your connection?)

Anyway, a disappointing trawl of the net brought up various negative responses to the question “Can I send a fax via broadband?” Most respondents seemed to think that the nature of DSL and cable connections precluded the use of a fax machine, unless you are on copper wires and have the right filter, and a conventional analog modem etc etc.

However, one particular forum came up with what I hoped would be the answer - Faxmail. But that service is long since gone, although the forum claimed it worked under Windows XP on broadband without filters and no need for an analog modem. TCP/Int was similar, I seem to recall.

Then I found this page from Kevin Savetz, which seems to be recently updated and so might hold a clue. You have to pay for some of them, but others are entirely free for low-load accounts.

Of course, the next question I should be asking is do I trust Faxmail with my government documents, but more to the point what do I do when the government wants to fax me back?

UPDATE: This post has been hanging around in the future queue for quite some time, getting pushed back repeatedly by more timely and more topical stuff. So, to my chagrin I read on May 2, a post from my good friend Amit Agarwal on Labnol espousing the benefits of drop.io, a new freebie online fax tool for US destinations. Reading his post reminded my of the Remote Printing Service, which I first used more than a decade ago!

UPDATED UPDATE: Others have since picked up on drop.io including ghacks