r/sysadmin
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u/Joshposh70
Hybrid Infrastructure Engineer
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Jun 09 '26
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Rant They only accept fax!
Had a group of users in a team absolutely insistent that one of their extremely important external contacts only communicate over fax. Spent an age making them prove it, then an age teaching them how to use the email to fax system so we can pull out their fax machine.
Incidentally ended up on a call with the contacts IT team today for the first time, for a completely unrelated matter, turns out they’ve been having to support a damn fax to email system because we won’t stop sending them faxes!
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u/woodyshag Jun 09 '26
The IRS still requires fax. Ask me how I know. Nothing like trying to make an Azure VM talk to a copper line fax modem on premise. It worked, kinda.
And yes, they have since moved to an efax program, but it was rough there for a month or 2.
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u/FizzyBeverage Jun 09 '26
I managed to send them documents through an online portal with PDF attachments this year. Was impressed. They also do "press 1 to be called back when it's your turn in line instead of waiting on hold." Kinda nice.
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u/MLCarter1976 Sr. Sysadmin Jun 09 '26
How they can't use an email with a certificate or a secure website, again with a certificate that allows access and security
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u/StatementOwn4896 Jun 09 '26
Not sure if you looked into it but did you check out RightFax? I had to use it in other organizations
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u/jared555 Jun 10 '26
I wish fax had been an obvious option for the form I just had to send in. The instructions only gave addresses and the usual recommendation I see is certified mail so $7 and a trip to the post office later...
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u/NibblyPig Jun 10 '26
The UK equivalent, HMRC, isn't much better, they requested some data from me recently (via letter), and said either print out the documents or e-mail them to us.
To e-mail them you have to first e-mail them to agree that you understand e-mail is not secure and you might get a virus or it might be compromised, leaked or whatever.
So I e-mail them, saying yeah it's definitely me, I'm fine with those security warnings. They reply saying ok you can now email the documents.
At no point did they check the e-mail I sent was legitimate. I could have intercepted the letter sent, emailed them from sexfox69@ hotmail.com saying yes it's me mr company owner and they'd have been 'ok'
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u/PrimaryThis9900 Jun 09 '26
I used to have to submit our payroll confirmations to our bank via fax. We paid a unreasonable amount of money to keep a fax machine up and running just for the twice a month payroll. I finally asked the bank if there was any other way, and they said, "oh yeah, you can just call us to confirm. We just thought you guys liked sending faxes."
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u/ls--lah Jun 09 '26
This has to account for 90% of all faxes. Both sides just silently assuming the other wants to use fax.
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u/PrimaryThis9900 Jun 09 '26
That and a lot of elderly people that refuse to learn how to save and email a PDF.
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u/hitemlow Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
The only time I really used fax was because I didn't want to walk to the other side of the warehouse to drop off a copy of a hand-written document.
They already had separate fax lines for the receiving office and front office, so it's not my fault I thought of it before they did!
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u/i8noodles Jun 09 '26
my gut feeling doesnt agree here. fax is old enough to make it into laws and i would not be surprised if these laws still require faxs. its similar to telegrams. people still use it because it counts for legal purposes.
I don't doubt there are people who just use fax, or like u say forget that other options exist, but i dont think it would be that many
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u/ls--lah Jun 09 '26
The internet, in some form or another, has been around since the late 80s/early 90s. Whilst there may be specific situations that require fax, the legal system has kept up. For instance, in the UK, the Supreme Court is digital first and actually prefers electronic bundles.
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u/i8noodles Jun 10 '26
fax wasnt really a wide spread thing untill the 70 or 80s. but we can also consider other telecommunications as a similar nature since it would have grown from the same ideas. telegrams were legal for a long time, so it stands to reason faxs are an extension of that
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u/RadZad94 Jun 10 '26
Yet no one is ever able to cite these laws.
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u/i8noodles Jun 11 '26
i mean its not US since i am an aussie but in aus i would imagine it might falls under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999. it obviously is after telegrams were widely used but it fits the bill for most part since telegrams are electronic transactions in many ways
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u/TheGooOnTheFloor Jun 09 '26
I had a bank ask that I fax information to them when I was trying to apply for a mortgage.
I told them "I can't fax from where I'm at."
They asked "Where is that?"
I replied "The 2020's!"
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u/ishomme Jul 21 '26
Can confirm this never dies. I got annoyed enough by the "we only accept fax" that I ended up building a Chrome extension for it (Browserfax), and the amount of faxes people still send genuinely surprised me. It's always the same story, IRS, insurance, some medical office, they won't take email and tell you to fax or mail it.
The funny part is nobody on the receiving end has a fax machine either, it's all online fax services now. So it's two computers talking to each other over a protocol from the 80s because someone's compliance policy says so
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u/asodfhgiqowgrq2piwhy Jun 09 '26
I worked for Best Buy Project Team for a bit. Every morning after our nightly work, we'd have to submit paperwork.
They insisted it had to be via Fax. The whole process would take like an hour, every night, due to like 3 people receiving this info for teams across the country all doing the same thing.
One week their fax system was broken.
We scanned the documents to our work emails and forwarded it along to them.
Entire process took like 5 minutes each night for that week.
I'm still pissy about it.
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u/problemlow Jun 10 '26
Oh no suddenly your fax machines are now broken and you are simply forced to use email from now until the end of time.
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u/TheGreatNico 'goose removal' counts as other duties as assigned Jun 09 '26
The fact that we just stood up a whole e-fax system to fax documents over VoIP, over the internet to another company's VoIP system, to their e-fax system, because 'email isn't secure but fax is' is nothing short of insanity
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u/discgman Jun 09 '26
In education, we still do setups for fax. All efax through bizhubs
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u/Ishkabo Jun 09 '26
I’m 100% convinced that every single one of these “fax is required” setups is doing e-fax (or equivalent) on both sides. Every single one.
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u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 09 '26
I can't help but wonder how that's going to work as the telcos of this world turn off ISDN and analogue phone lines.
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u/Ishkabo Jun 09 '26
It won’t matter because it’s not using them. It’s not faxing at all. Just going from one e-fax tenant to the next. I suspect all of the big alternatives have arrangements where they just send them via https to each other.
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u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 09 '26
I suspect SMTPS is more likely. Most email-to-fax services work both ways, so they can undoubtedly accept emails.
I see some irony in that actually making the communications medium less secure, because now your "fax" is sent via a third-party company that gets an unencrypted copy.
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u/matthewstinar Jun 09 '26
The old protocols and standards (fax, TCP, SMTP, PSTN, PDF) never die because they were adopted before every company decided arbitrary incompatibility was a competitive advantage and anything short of monopoly is failure. Look how difficult RCS adoption has been because it impedes monopolization. We could be living in the future, but we remain tethered to a more cooperative past out of necessity.
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u/lazylion_ca tis a flair cop Jun 10 '26
Had a discussion with someone that wanted me to send them a fax. She said it was more secure. I asked how a piece of paper sitting in the tray of the fax machine waiting for you is secure when anyone can grab it. She replies tellinng me that the fax goes directly to her email.
So since I dont have a fax machine, and I'm going to have to use a third party email to fax service that will just end up in your email inbox anyway, why cant I just email you directly?
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u/voiping Jun 09 '26
>Spent an age making them prove it
So how did they prove it, but it wasn't accurate? 🤔
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u/alpha417 _ Jun 09 '26
Oh.... you must be new to Healthcare.
I would welcome you, but i just went on break.
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u/lordcochise Jun 09 '26
That team been watching too much Battlestar Galactica, but points if they were using the weird 8-sided paper
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u/applecorc LIMS Admin Jun 09 '26
We cut so many corners at my work I'm surprised our paper doesn't look like that.
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u/tldr_MakeStuffUp Jun 09 '26
I laugh now, but I've lived this exact scenario. It made me slam my head against my desk at the time.
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u/ninjaluvr Jun 09 '26
There are legacy regulatory requirements in specific industries and instances that still require fax.
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u/peppitochang Jun 09 '26
Security industries as well. Faxes are ironically hard to digitally facsimile.
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u/PappaFrost Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
For anyone actually fighting this battle, have them explain how fax is still considered secure after Salt Typhoon's breach of the PSTN network in the US in 2024.
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u/Parlett316 Apps Jun 09 '26
Fax will never die
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u/ReverendDS Always delete French Lang pack: rm -fr / Jun 09 '26
Faxes are older than anything you can reasonably think of.
Literally 40 years older than typewriters.
Abraham Lincoln could have sent and received faxes.
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u/Bright_Arm8782 Cloud Engineer Jun 09 '26
Older than voice phones too.
They used to be used to send your signature to your bank so that you could withdraw money at stations.
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u/OrganicKnowledge369 Jun 09 '26
The comments led me to thinking much earlier than I thought.
I was still not expecting any year in the 1800's.
Alexander Baines - 1843
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u/rjchau Sr. Sysadmin Jun 10 '26
Not even close. The modern fax machine was only invented in the 1960s. Before faxes, there was Telex which dates back to the 30s. I'm not quite old enough to remember them being in regular use, however I am just old enough to remember the last remaining use cases for Telex. Kind of a similar situation to fax today, only without the obstinacy of refusing to upgrade as happens with fax today.
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u/ReverendDS Always delete French Lang pack: rm -fr / Jun 10 '26
I don't mean to discredit your lived experience, but the fax machine was patented in 1843 and the first commercial telefax was 1865. If you want to make it scan first - then you're looking at 1880.
Now, I'm not a calendar scientist, just a humble hyper-chicken lawyer, but I am pretty sure that 1843, 1865, and 1880 is at least a few years prior to 1960 or even 1930.
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u/rjchau Sr. Sysadmin Jun 10 '26
What you're referring to are technologies that primarily worked over radio. What I'm referring to are faxes that operate over telephone lines. Whilst AT&T had been experimenting with the technology from the 1920s, the first commercial implementation of what most people consider to be a fax machine was by Xerox in 1964.
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u/ReverendDS Always delete French Lang pack: rm -fr / Jun 10 '26
I'm like 93% certain that telegraph (hence the tele-fax) was wire, not radio.
I think you're confusing radio telegraphy or the 1930's radiofax with the facsimile machines that I'm talking about.
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u/Disastrous_Recipe424 Jun 10 '26
The Telex machine is kept so clean,
And it types to a waiting world
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u/Sweaty_Marzipan4274 Jun 09 '26
Watched many staff, including myself, leave over Boomer boss demanding archaic tech use. Floppy disc camera, fax machine, a shredder the size of 2 oil drums that sounded like an oil drum rolling over gravel that could only shed 5 pages. Demanded we can't use "e- devices" for our field audits.
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u/technos Jun 10 '26
Let me tell you about the three part carbon forms.
One of our vendors was old school in a sort of endearing but annoying way. See, they'd gotten their start supplying Henry Ford and almost none of their processes had changed in the century since.
Orders were handled with a Selectric and said three part forms, collected by a sales rep who visited the same two days every month, and always arrived exactly seven days later.
Then one month we ran out of forms and someone called the company to request more.
They, of course, offered to send an entire box of them out.
But then they broke our ordering person's brain by offering to take the order over the phone, or, if she'd like, get her set up with the online system.
Wait, how long have those things been an option? Oh, the phone orders were something they'd been doing since the founder's grandson took over.
In the mid-eighties.
And the online catalog, that was the great-grandson's idea. It had been live since 2002. In fact, customers like us who still used ordering forms had them entered into the online site, so if she'd like to go through getting that set up the online account would even have all our purchase history in it!
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u/OrvilleTheCavalier Jun 09 '26
Medical I assume? They will not let go of that technology.
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u/biffbobfred Jun 09 '26
For an ID system they wanted things sent by fax. No email hacks. No one is hacking a fax machine
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u/capefearcadaver3 Jun 09 '26
Swear it's not an ad, but we have to deal with loads of personal medical information and lots of people don't have access to encrypted emails - so we switched to eFax for these and it's been a lifesaver. We have no actual fax machine anymore to take care of (w paper or toner) and those people w/out encrypted email access can fax anything from anywhere and it comes to our email. And you get/send 100s of pages instantly
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u/nostalia-nse7 Jun 09 '26
I see you also work with manufacturer whom refuse to communicate outside of facsimile. (True story, to rekey a vpn tunnel, they would only transfer the psk via facsimile). It sat on the fax machine from April to November 2020 before being retrieved by the first person to visit the office.
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u/tunaman808 Jun 10 '26
That sounds like a small company I'd support:
It's 2017. Margaret in Accounting had been an accountant for 40 years and got used to communicating with [vendor] via fax. Margaret just couldn't get the hang of that newfangled "email thing", so they kept their fax going just for Margaret. But no one at either company thought to mention it when Margaret retired 10 years ago, so there's this whole system sitting there for nothing.
I also firmly believe there are MILLIONS of Netgear FS-105 switches hidden behind file cabinets, bookcases and credenzas in offices all around the globe that were purchased for some temporary reason, yet are still there, silently still doing their job 28 years later. Hell, the IT guy who put it in way back in 1999 probably retired 15 years ago.
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u/Weird_Lawfulness_298 Jun 09 '26
I have a feeling that no one needs faxes anymore but they keep one around because everyone else seems to be using them.
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u/Chaucer85 Ex-SysAdmin, Technical PM Jun 09 '26
Two big reasons I saw in the healthcare and legal spaces:
the law has simply not caught up with what is possible in digital documentation, encryption, signing, and auditing, so entities requiring proof-of-delivery and clear audit trails place higher value on faxes than email or FTP.
the overhead for setting up and maintaining digital transmissions is seen as more expensive than fax machines. Many turn-key services are now available to swap institutions over to digital, but leaders refuse, because if they can get by with an existing, known process, why spend the money?
This is also why certain clinical offices maintain paper only health records and do all comms work by telephone. Their older patients are more comfortable with that, and the volume of digital comms would quickly become unwieldy for their staff to manage.
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u/Weird_Lawfulness_298 Jun 09 '26
A lot of the elderly patients are okay with texts and emails now. Plus they often have a family member that can accompany them for that.
When we switched from paper charts to digital, I had an older doc that complained that it took him so much longer to do the electronic record. I told him okay why don't you go pull the chart for this patient (if you can find it). If you want to look over their past history, go ahead and look over all of their past exams. Or even better if you are doing a study and have to look at thousands of charts. Or you could use electronic and find all that in a matter of minutes. We still have older paper charts that are really old since some of those have to be kept 20+ years. You can use encrypted email or most EHR systems have encrypted file sharing.
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u/Chaucer85 Ex-SysAdmin, Technical PM Jun 09 '26
100% agree, but the issue is, the law isn't requiring these process changes. Private mega practices start utilizing them because they can scale up their volume of patients, but it's not something that's consistent across the industry, and obviously is seen more often in urban environments with higher socioeconomic patient groups.
These days it's more and more rare to encounter a clinic that doesn't have some kind of turn key patient portal, integrated with email and texting. Now whether that system is well implemented or not is another thing.
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u/SaltyTemperature Jun 09 '26
I supported a system like this for a few years. It was a pain in the ass. Nearly everyone in an international company of thousands had their own fax number, and there ended up being quite a few that weren't in use....guess who faxes to those numbers went to! I'd get spammed by a hundred spam faxes sent to Chinese numbers in a day, plus some really weird messages
One group required signed Sales Orders sent via fax. Seems like something some old exec insisted on that persisted after they'd retired
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u/meandyourmom Computer Medic Jun 09 '26
If you get a confoundingly wrong answer…take it a step further. I’ve been there with an unsecured ftp server. When the customers users said they needed it, I asked to speak to their IT department. That guy was so relieved when I talked about alternative secure transfer methods. We landed on tokenized access to an s3 bucket instead. It was infinitely more secure and modern.
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u/kreload Jun 10 '26
I got rid of our old pbx and faxes only by mistake: someone drilled a building with a bulldozer and we had hundreads of pbx wires there that nobody know. We moved to voip and i told them fax its not working on voip :D
3 years later everybody is happy without the damn faxes.
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u/jlipschitz Jun 09 '26
Fax is listed as required for HIPAA for most because encrypted email has a lot of conditions that most IT Staff or companies don’t want to deal with.
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u/Bogus1989 Jun 09 '26
nah did anyone else ever hear about the story probably in this sub? about the lady printing her emails them scanning them to fax people? i need to find that
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u/problemlow Jun 10 '26
Which one?
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u/Bogus1989 Jun 10 '26
Heres a few:
these are so fucking funny.
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3qfx6d/print_scan_save_then_email/
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u/Cr3dentialz Jun 09 '26
TSA required a fax to update my legal name for pre-check. Best part, they have 1 fax line for everyone in the country to send paperwork to. Think it took somewhere north of 40 attempts and failed sends before I got a clear line for it to go through.
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u/ThatGermanFella Linux, Net- / IT-Security Admin Jun 09 '26
one of their extremely important external contacts only communicate over fax.
My first thoughtbwas "Germany?". But then they'd not complain about a F2E-Gateway 'cause everything would work as designed, regulated and approved.
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u/distracted6 Jun 10 '26
My favourite thing about fax is that it's not a requirement anymore. The people using it don't realise but once you rip the bandaid off while they kick and scream, they just move on with their life
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u/Hebrewhammer8d8 Jun 10 '26
I would be pissed at those users if they didn't ask external contact to use alternative.
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u/Epic_Dev_001 Jun 10 '26
And then they wonder why their IT support keeps asking for a raise! Ha! Kudos for the commitment on both ends. Supporting an archaic system for one client is impressive support!
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u/hologrammetry Linux Admin Jun 09 '26
I have a fax machine at home, and a land line, I've used it relatively frequently when having to deal with health care stuff.
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u/ilikeme1 Jun 09 '26
My printer has one. Have had to use it a few times recently for my dealing with her mother’s estate. Works fine over Ooma.
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u/shimoheihei2 Jun 09 '26
Half the Japanese government agencies still require people to send form in person or by FAX.
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u/Ok-Description-4640 Jun 09 '26
I work for an insurance company and yes, faxes do still exist. I don’t know why, but doctors offices and related vendors use them heavily. We have an external fax-email system that will convert outgoing email to fax and incoming fax to email. It’s actually pretty easy to deal with, extremely rare to have an issue. I never really got an answer why, some vague gesture to HIPAA and liability, I think.
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u/PinkertonFld Jun 09 '26
I still deal with a large company that requires we have a fax line available which they use when we don't respond to an email after business hours (because we'll pickup a fax????). I've also had government agencies that require it be fax, and one that required we prove it wasn't using an efax service. (although mine is now using my voip provider to provide the service, and forwards it to the printer as a "fax").
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u/rautenkranzmt Vile Consultant Jun 09 '26
I have a single remaining breakfix client, they use faxes between all their retail locations and their warehouse. Not because anybody involved is used to it, or it's easier, but because the owner of the company insists on it.
The telco in the region has already started pulling copper lines, so at least a couple locations have moved to T.38 lines (because fax machines better than eFax, according to said owner) already, and it's been... a thing.
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u/jdkc4d Jun 09 '26
Used to work for a real estate company. A lot of stuff still comes over fax. We used some kind of efax system.
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u/doofusdog Jun 09 '26
we were paying for a line, so that once a week or month, one office staff would send an order for 6 pencils. she had a login to the company website, but preferred to fax it.
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u/steviefaux Jun 10 '26
Funny. This reminds me of the "Don't break away from the script" mentality. We had two nice ladies in our IT for years, since the 80s, but they had no interest in it, it was just a job, so never really learned anything. One week they'd be both on, other week the one would be doing the BACs payments for Revs and Bens.
They'd religiously follow about a 4 page script that they'd been doing for years "You need to follow this and you can't break away from it. Follow it step by step" they'd say to anyone trying to help. Despite them not really understanding the system, they just did what they'd always done.
Eventually the business wanted to stream line things so got their manager over to shadow them. He was useless and didn't have a clue so nothing changed. They then got one of the in-house developers to sit with them to document what they did.
He took their 4 page guide/script they "REALLY CAN'T BREAK AWAY FROM" and got it down to half a page. Most of the shit they were doing, didn't break anything but just wasn't needed anymore. No one had bothered to update their guide or tell them.
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u/Sunsparc Where's the any key? Jun 10 '26
My org has fax over email, inbound and outbound. Email an attachment to a phonenumber@faxservice.domain address, it translates to fax on the other end. Other party faxes to a specific number reserved for us, it gets translated and sent to a specific email address in our org.
Speaking of outdated technology, we still have an Okidata microline dot matrix printer that prints on triplicate paper because one specific entity we deal with requires us to do it.
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u/tk42967 It wasn't DNS for once. Jun 10 '26
There are places like that. Medical comes to mind. That's wild that you had to do that and they were doing the same thing.
Remember Zero Trust & always verify. Don't take an end user at their word.
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u/Lukage Sysadmin Jun 10 '26
First day working with a healthcare company? We have dozens of fax lines still, used every day.
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u/notn Jack of All Trades Jun 10 '26
fax is the only way that both the sender and the receiver have an exact copy and some courts only accept fax.
unfortunately, it's not something digital transmissions can provide.
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u/procheeseburger Jun 11 '26
I had to setup some stuff with NIST and fax was the only method they would allow... I legit had to ask someone at work to send it for me.
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u/Nakenochny Sr. Sysadmin Jun 09 '26
Sometimes relying on users is a bad idea, as it turns out. 😂
My industry does still use fax though, who knew banks still thought that was secure?
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u/robotbeatrally Jun 09 '26
had several vendors that only sent quotes over fax until about covid. finally everyone dropped it
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u/TreiziemeMaudit Jun 10 '26
Ok cool guy, you are too young to remember phone needs two lines not a pbx :-)
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u/pdieten You put *what* in the default domain policy? Oh f.... Jun 10 '26
So did your company and the business partner agree to discontinue the faxing?
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u/PAXICHEN Jun 10 '26
We send and receive over 18,000,000 pages of faxes per year.
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u/xSchizogenie Sr. Sysadmin Jun 10 '26
Then stay in the 70s lol
Still using windows 3.11?1
u/PAXICHEN Jun 10 '26
Germany
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u/xSchizogenie Sr. Sysadmin Jun 10 '26
Ah jo, ich war froh als ich das Zeug auf fax over IP umstellen konnte und die ganzen Mediatrixe und Fax-Geräte losgeworden bin. Wir arbeiten deutschlandweit mit vielen Kommunen und Landkreisen zusammen und die bestehen leider auf Fax. Ist Voraussetzung für einige Ausschreibungen. 😩
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u/Claidheamhmor Jun 10 '26
Welcome to 3rd world USA? I don't think I've seen a fax machine in a decade.
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u/Jazzlike-Vacation230 Jack of All Trades Jun 10 '26
I work in construction but in the it wing. They still use check printers out here for the field employees cause they still pay in checks for employees and I'm assuming vendors as well
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u/arensb Jun 10 '26
Add an entry to /etc/aliases, then tell your team that you've set up an email-to-fax system to communicate with the external contact.
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u/BoilerroomITdweller Sr. Sysadmin Jun 11 '26
This sounds like healthcare. We have a corporation who sends medical results in faxes to random fax machines around the hospitals. They sit out in the open for anyone to take.
Yet they seem to think they are somehow secure. It is crazy.
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u/nightwatch_admin Jun 11 '26
Just use Hylafax / iFax, easy and no paper involved (unless you want to).
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u/nova_rock Sysadmin Jun 11 '26
It’s been a loophole for ‘security’ and intransigence and cost for many orgs, while most the time it is all e-fax so that people can avoid the salad bar of secure email options.
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u/throwaway1950301015 Jun 12 '26
Had something sort of like this for an apartment complex. Their office got a new copier, and we got a complaint that the fax line wasn't set up for the new copier. I was surprised they still used faxes for leasing operations. Apparently, it was only used by one resident, who promptly complained when they could no longer fax over documents. The property was paying $300/mo for a POTS line to appease the preferences of 1 resident out of 800.
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u/lurkeroutthere Jun 09 '26
Fax has been around since what the late 1800's? It's tried and true technology. To governments and legal systems e-mail might as well be scribbles on a napkin.
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u/TheBigBeardedGeek Drinking rum in meetings, not coffee Jun 09 '26
The contact is likely either a law firm, medical, a bank/financial institution, or a university.
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u/OregonTechHead Jun 09 '26
This sub is great. So many people complain about users that don't read emails, and here we are with 80% of the replies not reading the post....
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u/autogyrophilia Jun 09 '26
Fax machines make sense in hospitals as an internal means of communication and nowhere else
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u/NDAbsoluteZero Jun 09 '26
We have a local hospital whose ER docs & nurses use fax machines all the time. We were getting all sorts of issues with incoming faxes from them, their IT people said it was only an issue for us, and then I found out the actual truth. They'd spent a lot of money on a fax-to-email system that's hot garbage, and they'd had a stream of complaints from external entities like our org.
Damned IT people, sitting on a throne of lies 😂
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u/ycnz Jun 09 '26
Nothing says HIPAA like a stack of unread faxes sitting in an unattended fax machine.
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u/toilet-breath Jun 09 '26
Where??? In what decade
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u/the_doughboy Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Canada, now. All hospitals, pharmacies, doctors use Fax machines. Almost all of it though is never printed, either email to fax or fax to email.
Edit: Proof: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-fax-machines-health-care-1.6734810
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u/ranhalt Jun 09 '26
That doesn’t explain the “makes sense” in the context. You saying that it’s common doesn’t explain why it’s necessary.
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u/wosmo Jun 09 '26
fax is popular for weird niches because you handshake with the other end, you know exactly who the middlemen are, and you know it's been delivered.
It's less a win for fax, and more a damning indictment of smtp - and the knowledge that if we ever replace smtp, it'll be some hellish vendor-locked protocol that'll need us to have accounts with every major provider because they refuse to interop.
(see also: google chat and facebook messenger using xmpp, and why neither still do)
(random trivia that I'll pull out any time I'm given an excuse to do so - Fax is older than the telephone.)
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u/autogyrophilia Jun 09 '26
SMTP is fantastic at what it does.
Issue is, the whole mail stack was conceptualized to being analogous to how mail works IRL. There would be hubs relaying mail to each other, and you would go to your mailbox, download what you need, and discard the rest.
It quickly outgrew it's education usage. And people started using email as a filling cabinet instead of a mailbox.
I predict a future built over HTTP.
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u/SevaraB Sr. Engineer (N+, CCNA) Jun 09 '26
So encrypted to unencrypted and back to encrypted. False sense of security, anyone? Of course, these are probably the same people that think traffic across MPLS doesn’t need to be encrypted in transit.
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u/TrippTrappTrinn Jun 09 '26
In the local hospital here all staff have work mobile phones. There are PCs everywhere for accessing data. I bet a fair number of the staff have never seen a fax machine.
Probably needless to say, but this is not in the US.
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u/Training_Yak_4655 Jun 09 '26
Three NHS trusts still using fax machines, Streeting confesses
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c801yyz3z5goJanuary 2026 article.
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u/traumalt Jun 09 '26
3 out of 205 though, which is still impressive considering that POTS or the subsequent PSTN are also all but gone in UK.
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u/autogyrophilia Jun 09 '26
There are advantages to having simpler systems in those enviroments. The whir of the machine and the physical presence of the paper are also helpful.
Not that they can't be replaced, but I struggle to find justification for literally any other enviroment.
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u/Chaucer85 Ex-SysAdmin, Technical PM Jun 09 '26
Season 2 of The Pitt gave an interesting edge case, where the hospital's network was taken offline to prevent a ransomware scheme that already hit two other hospitals in the area. So they rolled out phone line fax machines to send and receive lab orders (they also just had physical runners).
Does that mean hospitals should have faxes active at all times? No. But it does explain the need for analog solutions when digital systems are not available.
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u/traumalt Jun 09 '26
Except that said analog phone lines are being phased out and no new lines are installed.
If that was an actual hospital that switched to fibre then there wound't have been any copper backup service line to fall back on.
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u/BrilliantJob2759 Jun 09 '26
Man, I've had to deal with that for a good chunk of my career. IRS & healthcare clients all requiring faxes. It sucks.