Lazyweb – decent one off faxing service

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LazyWeb hear me – can I please have a service where I can send a one off fax from my web browser, paying per page with a credit card or paypal or similar?

I’ve just spent two hours examining numerous fax services, trying ones that failed to deliver the fax, rejecting ones over priced for my purposes, lugging failing faxing equipment around, and now facing a 40 minute freezing cross London journey to a fax machine because some idiot in a large company demands a fax as a proof of identity and the whole sodding internet can’t supply this noddy service (let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that anyone can buy this particular piece of identity verification for £1 making it entirely unfit for purpose).

You hear me, Lazyweb? I’m prepared to pay for this service even!

7 Comments

  1. I remember when TPC-dot-int suggested that it might be possible to send images, but couldn’t work out how that was even possible, since email is incapable of supporting images.

  2. Alan, email is certainly capable of ‘supporting images’, either as an attachment or in an HTML email. I’m sure I’m just misunderstanding what you mean.

    Tom, how does WriteToThem do it?

  5. Tom, doesn’t one of your own websites send a fax to MPs from constituents who want to get in touch? Then why not use your own API to send your fax or build your own SendMyFax.com website using whatever you use at the moment for everyone else to use for a small fee?

  6. Gary – because developers, even lovely mySociety developers, cost a lot more than make it possibly to justify using their time to send a single fax!

    Thanks to everyone else for the tips, I’ll come back here next time and try one then.

    Tom

  7. I so thoroughly agree with Tom Steinberg. I sincerely believed that fax, a piece of medieval steam technology, would be obsolete by the mid 1990s, so I sold my 1980s fax machine in 1990 and have since dealt only with email attachments until I ran up against two big, supposedly “go-ahead” corporations (one cutting-edge software producer and another a domain name administrator). They both persisted in wasting forest and in offering the most specious arguments for insisting on receiving faxes. “We must have your signature and a recent photo”, they say. No big deal with email attachments, of course while fax signatures and photos are in crude, lo-res black and white. I point out that I can let them have a signature in blue, red or green and a colour photo, all as attachments and involving no paper and no extra phone costs. It’s also a bit more difficult to forge than lo-res black and white! But still they witter inanely away about “company security policy” as if that were an explanation! Due to such corporate stupidity I have to go down the road to the dentist’s surgery and use their fax. So I’m gobsmacked that no-one’s come up with a 50-cent or even a dollar per sheet online fax facility. I thankfully only run up against fax silliness about once a year but I reckon that Tom Steinberg and I are hardly the only individuals to be confronted by corporate fax inertia. We may not be a huge market but I think someone could make a bit of money by helping to put us out of our fax misery.