Hi. Just my $0.02 worth on this question.
However, fax is still very much alive and healthy in the area of imaged document exchange where the website or e-mail use would not be appropriate - i.e., where the sender wants to initiate the document exchange and the document is in a more-than-text form or image of some kind (applications, completed applications, handwriting, etc.). Furthermore, I don't see this usage of fax going away any time soon. Indeed, technology seems to be providing better and better ways for this to continue, and I see no end to this sender-initiated use of fax.
Agreed to some extent. However, most cases I think are somewhat overstated. I.e. people do fax applications back and forth in part because formats like MS Word don't necessarily guarantee layout. If PDF's were more commonly used, this would be more obsolete. But PDF producing and editing software is expensive, and you cannot exactly sign a PDF with your handwritten signature and send it back using standard hardware and software.
On the other hand, there is a general perception that a signature on a fax will be somewhat better than a signature on an email from a legal perspective (IANAL, though). This is where I have seen the greatest continuation of the fax.
It's worth pointing out that e-mail works off of a different premise than fax, and therefore cannot ever fully obsolete fax as it is. Unlike a website or fax, e-mail does not provide a mechanism for both the sender and the receiver to negotiate the communication and presentation of the document. E-mail permits the sender to send arbitrary filetypes with arbitrary formatting which the receiver may or may not be able to utilize easily. With a website the receiver should be aware of what they are clicking on, and with fax the receiver "capabilities" are communicated at the outset to the sender, and the sender must select tranmission parameters from those capabilites. Thus, with fax the sender can have a reasonably good degree of confidence that when the receiver sends the confirmation signal (MCF) that the receiver can view the document and that it appears to the receiver nearly exactly the same way as it appears to the sender. Not only can you not do this with e-mail, but furthermore with e-mail you only know that your outbound mail relay has accepted the mail or not. You do not have any reassurance that that the intended recipient actually did receive the message. And with the large amount of spam out there (very large in comparison to the quantity of junk faxes), spam filters, e-mail viruses, and such, e-mail really isn't a very good means to transmit these kinds of things.
Fair enough. But I think the largest advantage I have seen you point out is the fact that email is packet-switched, and store-and-forward while the fax is connection-switched and delivered immediately or not at all. Therefore fax systems are fundamentally more reliable than email.
But, let me ask you this. Suppose that I produced PDF forms which could be edited and then uploaded into a drop-box on my web site. This does not address some of the concerns about www/email vs fax, but it does address many of them.
I suspect that you are right-- that fax services will eventually become merged with the internet, but we will need to see how that exactly occurs.
Best Wishes, Chris Travers
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