Many people find a use for fax machines.

The typical user is anyone who works at or with an office in an administrative function. Anyone from a secretary to a PA to a manager to a director to an administrative assistant will be a potential user of a fax machine.

In addition, fax machines also find use in amongst members of the population who have a form of disability or physical impairment, not least of which are those who are hard of hearing. The fax machine grants them the ability to use telephone lines to send images and writing instead of speaking and listening, giving these users a similar level of communication freedom as everyone else.

A trend which has emerged over the last 10 to 15 years has been to use the fax machine as a marketing tool, sending fax broadcasts to businesses and offices where it might be known that there is some interest in a product or service that a particular company might be interested in marketing.

However, there is also, along with this upsurge in marketing, a trend to utilize fax mechanisms to distribute spam. Very similar to the e-mail counterpart that most of us are now familiar with in one way or another, fax spam is the unsolicited sending a fax broadcasts en masse.

Consequently the recipients of these broadcasts usually find themselves inundated with messages that they are effectively paying for in paper and ink.

Unfortunately, there is little that can be done if the sender does not wish to comply with the law. For instance, hosting the fax transmission service outside of the country can eliminate most of the legislation put in place to protect businesses from unsolicited direct marketing of this type.

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