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.
What makes something outdated? No matter how old the wheel is, we don’t say the wheel is outdated. To become outdated requires having an option that is superiour in every way, or for every use case.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What makes outdated is peoples willingness to use it.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.