[GLLUG] FAX

[Mark Preston]

On 17/10/14 16:52, Andrew Black wrote:
> /No one really uses fax any more. Everyone accepts PDF email
> attachments instead now./
>
> I thought that too until I had loads of medical appointments with my
> (now late) father. The health service is very fragmented and (in my
> experience) are quite cagey about letting patients know their staff
> email.  And you can't really be sure they are read. I got a flame from
> my dad's GP for sending him an email - he had grudgingly given it to me
> months before - he only read email once a week.
>
> I haven't yet quite had the energy to plug my printer/scanner which
> claims to do fax into a telphone socket. I have a gut feeling it wont be
> quite as simple as it sounds. But I think I ought to before my mother
> gets seriously ill.
>

Hi Andrew,
Faxes are actually very secure. To encrypt emails the recipient and the 
sender both need their own public and private encryption keys, and to 
have verified these, or exchanged their public keys personally. That is 
one reason why it hasn't exactly caught on.

See
"Why the Healthcare Industry is Moving from Email to Fax"
http://www.gfi.com/blog/email-to-fax/

It might be that your dad's GP never got away from using faxes, or maybe 
that he is "ahead of the curve" in this respect!

You might be interested to find that you can send a fax of a pdf 
document online for free using a service such as http://www.myfax.com/free/

-- 
Regards,
Mark Preston