I was chatting with a very successful businesswoman the other day and she told me, “No one sends faxes anymore, don’t be ridiculous! Who even has a fax number these days?”
As a sign of the times, she is a heavy user of AI and has it organise her whole day and even help write her emails. When I asked her whether all those emails always ended up in the inbox, she said “of course”, although the pause before answering suggested she wasn’t quite so sure.
Now, for a handful of our clients, fax is still alive and kicking. Believe it or not, we still send hundreds of thousands of faxes every month. Yep, you read that right. If you’re working on the theory that a picture tells a thousand words, fax can still have its place too. You can send a full document exactly as you intended it to look, without needing to worry about how different email clients or inboxes might display it.
Why do some organisations still use fax?
Often because it’s part of an established workflow, not because somebody is particularly attached to the sound of a fax machine. That includes parts of Australian healthcare, where documents often need to reach systems that still run on fax. The receiving organisation may have a fax number built into its document-handling process, and the sender simply needs a reliable way to reach it. Is fax always the best option? No. Where privacy, security or modern secure messaging point to another solution, that’s often the better choice. But we shouldn’t assume a technology has vanished just because we no longer see the machine on somebody’s desk.
And as for those emails always reaching the inbox? That increasingly depends on things like sender reputation, authentication and relevance. If you’ve ever wondered, here’s why your emails can land in spam.
Where marketing via fax used to be commonplace, today it is actually quite unusual.
Do you still need a fax machine?
Do people still have fax machines? Surprisingly, yes, although you certainly don’t need one yourself. We can send faxes digitally, allocate you a fax number and have any fax replies sent straight back to you via email. We still manage hundreds of fax numbers for clients doing exactly that.
How do you send a fax without a fax machine?
In practice, you use a digital fax service. You provide the document and the destination fax number, and the service handles transmission. For incoming documents, a fax number can be connected to an electronic inbox so the recipient receives the document by email or through an agreed system. You still need to check that the number is correct and that the method is appropriate for the information being sent. Technology has moved on, even if the number on the other end still looks reassuringly old-fashioned.
There is no doubt the fax world has changed dramatically. We went from sending millions of faxes a month to hundreds of thousands. But they are still out there, and we still have the technology to get those faxes delivered. If you’re weighing fax up against other options, here’s how to choose the right business communication channel.
Who’d have thought that in 2026 I’d still be talking about fax?