On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 20:59 +0000, member jessejazza wrote:
All i meant by security; is that umpteen emails get lost somehow each day. Sending a fax one can be sure that it has reached its destination
Can you though ? Many companies now use a computer as a fax gateway at least for inbound if not outbound as well, most of these actually turn your fax into an email. Even if they are using a regular fax machine, any model made in the last 15 years will probably store the received document in memory if it can't print it (i.e. out of paper) to the sender this will be reported as received but if the machine is for example power cycled before it is able to print then your fax will be lost. Compare this to a fair percentage of mail systems that will send an NDR if the message cannot be routed to it's intended recipient.
and can only be read by someone there.
Actually not true..fax encoding is highly tolerant of line noise, low speed and the format is well understood...a line tap anywhere in circuit would yield the contents of the transmission, hell I have the equipment to do this in a non invasive (inductive) manner in a drawer not 10 feet away from me. That puts it to my mind about equal to email.
With email or post it can be intercepted! Since a fax makes a noise when it arrives it is more likely to be read than a letter or email IMO.
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.
For example, for my classic car parts i use fax listing the items and card number at the bottom. As i know these folk the important part of the security is that it isn't intercepted on route. Anytime i can use a fax i do to save on postage... like sorting out a council tax error
- i know that fax will get straight to the intended department.
So what happens to the bit of paper with your card number on ?...how can you be sure that it is disposed of in a responsible manner once the transaction is complete. How can you be sure it doesn't end up in a wastepaper bin intact..or ends up in a file so that an office temp in 2 years time can skim it ?
You are right about email (in it's default configuration) being an insecure transport..but to consider faxes any better is probably miss-guided.
As to people noticing faxes over emails I think you are half right...As a company we did try invoicing by emailing pdf's for a while to save postage costs, we found an approximate 30% increase in the need to chase for payment even though in most cases we were able to verify the email had made it to the intended recipient. We returned to postal invoices. Fax I suspect would have yielded approximately the same results as email because most of our clients have fax to email gateways (we should know, we installed them!) Those that don't have a single machine somewhere quite likely to be nowhere near the intended recipient. So then you are reliant on someone picking it up and giving it to accounts...IMO that would be less reliable than emailing a known address for the company accountant.