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.
Email IS shit, worst is that its everywhere required to login… a direct line to demand my attention…
But Fax though? New People starting at a workplace today maybe have heard of those but the knowledge how to use/maintain/fix them is fading rapidly. Besides that its a massive waste of trees.
We need a better system then Email, absolutely agreed but it ideally should be one we can keep using for a while in the future with modern encryption standards.
What you can probably always do is to deliver a physical letter without return address.
If someone struggles with the knowledge of fax maintenance, which is just a printer with a phone line, they are probably not sufficiently competent for other aspects of the office job that would task them with it. I’m not going to give up fax so that people can be less competent at their jobs.
Receiving a fax does not imply using tree-based paper. In fact, does not imply using paper of any kind. A fax arrives in a digital format (TIFF Class F). Whether a recipient chooses to print it is a matter of the recipient’s preference, which the sender does not control. If they opt to print it, that paper is recyclable.
It is not wasteful to make a useful purpose of something, particularly when paper is a quite useful form of carbon storage. If you are concerned with wasting trees, you would be better focused on the tree services who dispose of cut down trees into landfills. Several trees were threatening the foundation of a house I lived in. The tree service removed them. They offer the wood to any takers but no one was interested in it. And that was at the time lumber costs quadrupled. So they brought the trees to the landfill. Converting those trees into paper would have /avoided/ the waste. The trees they dumped into the landfill may not have been buried deeply. So if they end up in a shallow grave, the tree rots and emits methane gas that escapes into the atmosphere, which is 25 times more harmful than CO₂.
If you want to focus action on deforestation, targeting the paper industry (or any industry that puts the stored carbon to good use) is misfocused. Boycott Pepsi (#PalmOil) and the beef industry. Stop eating beef. This makes a more effective stride against deforestation.
You’re not going to incentivize departure from email by attacking fax. That’s a recipe for forcing people to cling to email even more.
I do use the postal service when fax is not an option. It costs me money and has a higher CO₂ footprint. But I am trapped. The more offices that pull the plug on fax, the more snail mail I am forced to send because I have cancelled email. Because email¹ has cancelled me.
¹ Gmail, Outlook, SpamHaus et al
You really underestimate how outdated this technology is. May as well complain that no one is receiving your telegraph signal.
The issue is not that millennials and gen z aren’t competent to operate a fax if given a manual or an explanation. Its that its quite possible they have never had to operate a fax or owned a landline phone. They grew up entirely on mobiles and digital messaging.
That doesn’t mean they cannot possibly use old tech just that you cant reasonably expect them to have any experience with this technology.
Workingplaces and offices have also changed drastically over the years. We used to have a single fax machine somewhere legally mandated to keep just in case but thats no longer the case. Though physical letters are still accepted i believe.
Fair warning all of these are phasing out for better or worse. I have no say in it, i just observe changes trough time.
What makes something outdated? No matter how old the wheel is, we don’t say the wheel is outdated. To become outdated requires having an option that is superiour in every way, or for every use case. Email in the ’90s probably came close (if not wholly) better than fax in every way, but at that time fax was more accessible than email and PGP did not catch on. Then email in the 2000s took a serious regression… nearly useless to privacy and digital rights proponents, thanks to Google, Microsoft, and Spamhaus. Email has become more accessible to people who don’t give a shit about privacy, decentralisation and digital rights, but it has become less viable to those who do.
Oh how i wish technoculture evolved with a clear logical progression of objective increased superiority but reality simply is not that case.
What makes outdated is peoples willingness to use it. While i recognize why believe fax to be superior and therefor want to use it, the majority of youth who have never used one would see it as an inconvenience and inferior system compared with email.
Part is that they don’t know better, they grew up without privacy and often don’t recognize a need for it…
Another is that for example you cant copy paste contents of a physical fax. You cant forward it to the right team with a single click. And you cant quickly reply to request more information.
Fact is that as a result the majority of the workforce is increasingly moving away from these devices and modern offices are designed without having them in mind.
Thats what ultimately makes it obsolete and outdate. That your government office pulled the plug is proof of this. With no bad intention they didn’t consider that anyone would still uses them. And when they are still used the goal is to accommodate elders and tech illiterate people and not to provide a private alternative.
I do still agree with your opinion. Email is bad and people don’t seem to care.