@tonyshowoff said in Faxing:
@Dashrender said in Faxing:
email goes over an unencrypted network that can be easily tapped by spies.
That's pretty unusual these days, and is typically a way to get your email flagged as spam. Server to server SMTP is basically always encrypted now, and client server rarely isn't.
Ok sure, this is generally true, but it's meaningless. it's simply the transfer from one host to another than encrypted. There's no verification that the receiving host is in fact the needed destination host, a MITM could have a host reading everything as it's passing it along to someone else. So sure casual observers are blocked.. but a bad actor like a a government or even an ISP could easily intercept all of that SMTP traffic, pretend to be that SMTP server, accept the mail and then forward it on.
Tapping a POTS line (not a SIP trunk) is much harder and requires local access to the end points, or hacking into the phone companies systems. These alone in my opinion make it more secure - nothing Scott or anyone else has said why an email sent over the internet is more secure than this situation.
That doesn't even matter, because with fax since there's no end to end encryption or authentication, there's situations like that PHI leak several years ago where a Pizza Hut accidentally was faxed tons of medical records. Anyone can read anything, there's no guarantee of who is or who is not seeing it, or even that it arrives. At least emails can bounce back.
You're talking about a small chance of something happening. Again this was more likely a cause because the medical placed had Pizza Hut on speed dial for ordering lunch. But even if that wasn't the case, and the accidental wrong dialing did just so happen to hit upon a life fax line, you're still limited to something like 1 page a min for faxing. While it's possible to send hundreds of pages of faxes.. it's just not that common. So while a problem, the risk of large exposure is small.
As for the fax printing out on a MFP sitting in the middle of the office. Sure, so this is one area where email clearly wins out. Though in my case, in medical cases, there are very little if any limitations on who can/should be able to see anything medical coming in on the fax machine.
That's not true in most environments though, plenty of doctors' offices and other places have the machines sitting there. A pharmacy I used to go to in Kansas had their fax machine to where one could reach over the counter and pull out anything. I couldn't authenticate on their auto-locking terminal though.
While I'm sure this is true in a great many places - that's their problem, not faxes fault for stupid placement.
Sending an email to a single person wouldn't be an acceptable solution for us. We need to make sure we have a team of people who are responsible for accepting and processing faxes. They shouldn't not get handled just because someone is on vacation, etc.
Group mailboxes are not that new of a concept.
Of course they aren't, I suppose if a group box allowed only one copy of the incoming document to be shown to prevent duplicated work, that would be an idea there. At least with the faxes, there's typically only one paper copy (to start with) or one copy in the network location. Unlike it being sent to 10 people.. and the other 9 have no idea if you handled the fax or not already.
