By Don Oldenburg Washington Post Staff Writer
All righty then, enough pleading! As promised, here are some solutions for desperate fax machine owners who are sick and tired of screeching junk-fax transmissions in the middle of the night, junk faxes bogarting their machines during work hours, and junk faxes using their printer ink and paper to deliver unsolicited, unwanted, cheesy advertisements.
For many home fax machine owners, the junk-fax pandemic has grown into an annoyance equivalent to telemarketing at its worst -- before the National Do Not Call Registry struck a blow for privacy and sanity. These dastardly faxed commercials typically break federal law. Like spammers, junk-faxers broadcast the same message to millions of fax machine numbers at once. And more often than not, the faxes promote scams not worth the paper they're printed on.
Early last month, the Consummate Consumer was inundated with complaints about junk faxes following the junk-fax column ("Your Machine Is Spewing Again," Sept. 25) and asked readers to share solutions for stopping the menace -- short of hammering the fax machine with a Louisville Slugger. The result? Good news, sufferers! Solutions R Us! The best of them: