I currently have a fax number that is widely used by my clients. Problem is that I get a ton of fax "spam" if you will. I am looking for the BEST solution to have these faxes forwarded to e-mail, while keeping my existing fax number since that is the one everyone knows and uses.
I am somewhat familiar with e-fax, but they can not re-use my existing number, plus you have to pay for outgoing faxes. I have seen where I can have a forward feature put on my fax line that would forward to an e-fax number, and I would still be able to use my fax machine for outgoing faxes (at least that is how I understand it).
Because of the number of "spam" faxes I receive via fax, I have to replace my toner about every other week. As you can imagine this is a very high expense for me, so I thought if I could have them sent to e-mail then i could print the ones I want to keep and delete the trash.
Does anyone have any better solutions than this. Someone mentioned a Microsoft Fax Software, but I did not have any luck finding anything out about it, so therefore I know nothing about it. Please let me know if there is a better alternative solution.
Thanks,
ju
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Why don't you consider forwarding all of it, _everything_, to email, then using one of the several programs available for sorting out spam look at it and those things that are _not_ spam have them automatically sent on to your clients through an outbound email to fax thing. Sometimes, when things get as overwhelming as spam has become, you have to work things in the reverse fashion. I think it would be a lot cheaper than trying to take it all and try to do it as you are talking about.Take email for example: Instead of battling it all, what would happen if everyone just used a 'white list' of what they would accept and bashed _everything else_. Here, the 'internet postage; scheme might work okay: To get on my 'white list' you send me some nominal amount of 'internet postage' (off hand, let's say 5 cents), if I approve you for my white list I return your nickle and add your email to the white list. As of some certain day, everything else is blacklisted. If I do not want you on my list, then I keep your nickle and ignore you. Stuff that is not on the white list just gets automatically smashed and destroyed. Before long, so-called 'public email' would just be spammers (anyone who did not send a nickle one time, with a request to be added. That way we do not need filters, and we do not need to try and trace it back, etc. The presumption is that _all is spam_ except the occassional good, valid pieces of email, as per the white lists. Spammers would not send the nickle to start with, and although valid users would send it one time to be validated on the white list, they'd soon get their nickle returned. Maybe we should just write off email as any sort of useful tool; force the spammers (and YOU have to _prove_ you are not a spammer by sending that first nickle with _no guarentee_ you would get it back from anyone) to play it our way.
Instead of trying to sort through it all, let's just asume it is all spam, and start from scratch. Newcomers late to the initial 'enrollment' period would have to begin their 'email experience' by sending a nickle to the person they wish to white list them. To get that nickle to me, the newcomers (once we have gone entirely to a white list system) would have to have a 'flag' on their email that first time with some sort of sensible email saying 'I want to be on your white list', otherwise of course they'd be killed like all email, presumed to be spam, since that is how we now define email. For almost all of us, it would be far easier to work with a handful of regular correspondents than a few thousand items to sort through each day, most or all of which is spam anyway. PAT]