Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Only if you are sitting next to it and aren't doing something that prevented you from hearing the noise. I would say that people that are ignoring emails and postal mail are just as likely if not more likely to ignore faxes.
I think the extent to which people ignore any medium en-masse depends on (a) signal:noise ratio, and (b) their desired to read that "signal".
If someone gets loads of faxes and loads of email, but the faxes are all (or almost all) orders, and the email mostly junk, they'll pay a lot more attention to the faxes. (If they're mostly invoices, I have a suspicion that a lot might go missing!)
I'd say about 80% of the faxes we get are junk, so we don't all rush to deal with faxes. (We also use fax->email, but its based on WinFax and my Linux desktop can't open the attachments except by using the WinFax viewer under Wine, and that doesn't work very well.)
The major problem with email is of-course signal:noise ratio. I find it staggering that there isn't a better solution than the current implementation.
So what happens to the bit of paper with your card number on ?
Remember those old card swipe machines which used carbon paper? Huge volumes of the carbon paper ended up in rubbish sacks, un-shredded, giving easy access to all card details and signatures.
New technology, new problems, but we're fools if we think it used to be much better.
Incidentally, the thrust of this conversation seems to be whether email or fax is better for sending credit card details - I most certainly would not use either! I'm happy with secure web sites from companies I have already decided to trust for other reasons, which is naive because a lot of the details will doubtless still get printed and not destroyed at the other end (is it still naive if I know it is naive?). But in any transaction there is an issue of trust - I could hand them cash in person only to get home and discover that the product doesn't work. At least with credit cards there's a reasonable chance that the credit card company will have to suffer the loss rather than me.