Are fax machines obsolete?

I was helping a client the other day and we were discussing phone lines and fax machines. He was trying to figure out how many phone lines he needed for his home phone, business phone and fax.

I told him that there was no need any more for a dedicated phone line for a fax machine. And I wasn't even referring to getting one of those little gizmos that you can hook up to your phone line that automatically detect whether an incoming call is a voice call or a fax.

Nope. I was referring to how obsolete having a fax machine is now to receive incoming faxes. The alternative? Any of the free or low-cost Internet fax services such as eFax.

Virtual fax numbers

With a service such as eFax you are assigned a regular telephone number that you can publicize as your fax number even though that phone number doesn't physically exist in your home or office. Instead, any time someone sends a fax to your assigned number it is delivered seconds later to your email address as an attachment that you can view right on your computer or print to your printer.

I would have gone as far with this client as to tell him that fax machines in general are obsolete but I recognized his need to send outgoing faxes without a lot of hassle. I say without a lot of hassle because he also had an all-in-one printer that included a scanner. So instead of using his fax machine to send a document to someone he could have scanned the document into a PDF and then emailed the document to the recipient as an attachment.

But going back to ease of use, sticking a couple of pieces of paper in a machine and dialing a phone number was definitely the easier route for my client. So in the end I told him to hook the fax machine up to his business line and turn the auto-answer feature off. That way his fax will never answer the business line. Then I told him to set up an eFax account and use it for all incoming faxes and the fax machine for all outgoing faxes.

I also took a moment to explain the other benefits of using eFax such as electronic storage of faxes and how it was a greener solution since less paper was involved.

So I guess faxes will live on a little longer. But it won't be long until a child asks his mom, "Mommy, what's a fax?"