7 Good Reasons to Trash Your Fax Machine

I found a fraudulent charge on my charge account. The fraud unit told me I would receive a form by email & to return it by fax.

Digital records can be hacked or locked up by ransomware- not a problem with paper copies.

We use the FAX feature on our printer to send Rx’s to the pharmacy.

Some documents like HIPAA records(patient info) have strict controls on how they can be sent, and faxing is the simplest (although antiquated).
My wife has Power of Atty for her mom's medical stuff, and they won't allow her to email a PDF with proof of POA, it has to go via fax (ironically, we send it via eFax). They need to use a physical fax machine or a "HIPAA compliant eFax service" to receive it.
It's not that people don't want to change, some regulations haven't kept up with the times.

The IRS will not accept certain forms like POA's via efax. Not sure why they can't come up with an encrypted email system. There's always hope.

Security - Security - Security.

Some organizations still feel FAX is more secure than other electronic means. Recently a bank account transfer required forms be submitted by FAX (and only by FAX, not USPS) -plus- the submission had to be made using the FAX machine at one of the bank's branches! The explanation, this bank has been burned too often by email and other electronic means!

Of the downsides you mention, the biggest one for me is maintaining a traditional phone line. I do that for voice quality. When I drop the phone line I will go to an e-FAX service because I am not as concerned about security as is a bank.

Aloha all y'all...
OF all the reasons not to use a FAX machine, cutting down trees for paper is one of the least successful reasons in my view ... trees and wooden products are a renewable source of energy and material for useful creations and structures.
Wildfires and other destructive events of large swaths of forested areas often occur through mismanagement and disregarding best management practices.
Creating and planting trees for best and most productive growth, as well as most efficient growth, are also safer and least likely to burn out of control. Clear cutting forests are almost as bad as leaving them to their own devices until they catch fire naturally (or intentionally) and quickly burn out of control.
Additionally, paper use for FAX machines is infinitesimal compared to all the other uses of paper in a modern automated office.
(just my two cents worth ... certainly worth every cent you paid for it... (wink))
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Until that time. . .

meh anything that can be fax'd can be sent securely as an attachment in an email. Faxing is definitely passe.

I ditched the fax machine and the land line too years ago.

Email is not a secure way to exchange sensitive information. Encryption of attachments is problematic for many people. Many professional offices will not open attachments without verification of sender. Fax can still serve a useful function under certain circumstances.

Convenience. Fax is easy. All the other methods leave you guessing. Privacy? Show me a place where confidential faxes are not behind locked doors. Jammed paper? Hardly ever. Compared with fiddling around with various types of programs far less time. Docusign? Complicated often doesn't work, and oh by the way there is often a sell up that comes with it. Who uses rolls of fax paper these days? It's all plain paper.

Daryl Faxing is so 1990s! My primary care physician sends any prescriptions for meds he prescribes for me, electronically, right from HIS computer, directly to the pharmacy I use, which, in turn gives me a robocall to let me know when the med is ready to be picked up. No need for me to drive over to the pharmacy and wait 5 to 10 minutes, in line, before I can submit my prescription to the pharmacist, then have to return a couple of hours later to pick up the meds, and they will refill the meds automatically, every month, on recurring meds and will call my MD when the med needs reauthorization.

I haven't had a fax in years.I think I gave up my fax software around 2010.

We are grossly outnumbered
So what do we do?
We gotta get the villagers.
They're NOT ready to fight.
Man, we are choiceless.
What the fastest way to reach the village?
Why don't we FOX them?
FOX them?
FOX them!
(He ties a message on the neck of the fox.)
Take this message to the village as fast as you can.

This method of messaging traces its history back to the days of Robin Hood.

Yes, faxes are totally obsolete, but there are idiots out there (sometimes involving legal restrictions) who occasionally still insist on them. Fortunately for me, my company (a large corporation) provides its employees with a Fax2Mail facility. So if I need to receive a fax, I give the sender my company fax number, where it becomes an attachment to an email at my company email address. Then I remotely log on to my company computer and forward that email (with attachment) to my personal home email address. To send a fax I reverse the process. So how has this procedure improved in any way (either security or convenience wise) on directly emailing an attachment instead of first generating a fax? It hasn't of course. It just wastes a little time and effort to accomplish exactly the same thing. But I'll concede there is a bit of an amusement factor in demonstrating just how absurd the entire concept of a fax has become.

Paper is great stuff! Acid-free, archival paper outlasts digital storage. CDs can fail very quickly and the digital storage changes its codes rather often. Your enthusiasm in writing is fine, until you go overboard, beyond the limits of reality and actual costs, actual losses, with your statements. The flash drives will burn up in a building fire like the paper, if outside a fire proof storage unit. If the fax on regular paper is working, and it is secure over copper telephone wires, no hackers, why replace it? You have not made that case well, in this era of hacking as a major profession.

About 15 years ago, out of the blue, my fax machine rolled out an order mistakenly sent by a company in Israel telling me they would buy a dozen machine bolts for something like $143 each. The bolts were to be 1.5" x 8" long (from my memory), and made of some weird super steel alloy. I decided they wanted the bolts for a nuclear power plant. I faxed back, telling them to ignore their prospective vendor, and that I could supply the bolts for $121. (Of course I had no idea what I was talking about...). I haven't received a reply, and I probably won't, since my fax machine has been loafing in a closet for ten years.

Our collective fax dilemma is clearly the fault of Xerox for patenting the first fax machines (circa 1964?). Although, some would like to finger-point at the medical industry' interpretation of 'safeguarding' of medical records that is stuck somewhere in the '80s. Unfortunately, email is but a stop-gap transport method whose days seem to numbered.
Maybe someone can explain to me as to why (and how) a 'secure PDF' is LESS private than a paper fax.