I just had to send a msg to a gov office.
Email has been generally broken¹ the past couple decades. I prefer fax. It’s more reliable and I choose what I want to disclose to the recipient. Even in cases where part of the fax transmission routes over email, it’s still more reliable than pure email because those fax→email gateways are managed by recipients to ensure all-or-nothing (all faxes are delivered or none of them). Fax is immune to shenanigans like “mail server X accepts mail from Y but not Z”.
When I tried to send the fax, the fax machine did not answer. So I voice called the office. They said “we unplugged our fax machine”. WTF! So I said please plug it back in because I’m trying to send a fax. So a bit later I tried again and it worked.
Folks, we are losing fax because most of the population does not grasp the privacy compromise with email, and the compromise of netneutrality and reliability. If I am the only person in the world who keeps fax in use, fax will die fast because it’s easy to marginalise 1 person.
Footnote 1: Email is shit--
Even if the gov office mail server were to accept my msg, I face the problem of not wanting an email reply and not trusting them not to abuse whatever address I reveal to them. I don’t want to be forced to put Google and Microsoft in the loop on my conversations, to go through their hoops, solve their dkim CAPTCHA, and ultimately I don’t want to be forced to feed profitable data to those surveillance advertisers who have partnered with the oil industry. Google and SpamHaus broke email and the population accepted it. So email can fuck right off.
From my perspective E-Mails are more privacy friendly in every aspect. You can self-host your Mail account or choose a privacy friendly hoster. You can create separate accounts for every single mail you write and you can use encryption.
When using a fax you have to disclose your fax number - at least if you want a confirmation or reply and getting dozens of anonymous fax numbers for all kinds of purposes definitely isn’t as easy as gettings fresh mail addresses or an alias. And encryption for fax? Good luck with that. ;)
Good luck with that, 99% chance your outgoing emails will end up in a spam filter