Friend Faxes

March 14, 2025 10:39 AM

What would it take for my long-distance friends and I to set up a fax system for us to send hand-written letters to each other?

I have a lot of long-distance friends and sometimes texts and e-mails feel impersonal, and since I live in a different country (Canada vs US) letters can take a while. I was just thinking today it would be kinda cute if we could dash off a hand-written letter once in a while and immediately fax it to each other, and then immediately fax a response back. What would it take, financially and logistically, for this to work in 2025?

Since we're all millennials, none of us have a landline. Some of my friends have an all-in-1 printer. I know there are services like Fax Zero that can send faxes between the US and Canada for free.

posted by loonietrillium to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

I've used a bunch of free fax services they're fine, but cut out the middleman. They will receive a PDF and "fax" it to your email address. Why not just write handwritten notes, scan them with your phone, and text or email them? I sort of hear you about their being something quaint and old fashioned about faxing versus emailing the handwritten notes, but my experience of the free fax services is that you will receive them via emails anyway.
posted by fennario at 10:52 AM on March 14 [9 favorites]

Appropriate / available tech? I have been in the habit of sending letters and postcards to my descendants. Imagining the mortification of sending essentially the same ould shite to the same person, I have been snapping backup photos of the quill-pen screeds before applying a stamp and sending. When the ever-rising cost of postage beggars my pension, I'll start emailing the facsimile. Until then, everyone loves getting mail in the letterbox.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:54 AM on March 14 [1 favorite]

If you have certain printers, you can connect it to an email that prints it relatively in real time. I send my dad "faxes" to his HP inkjet on the regular, and it's only wifi connected
posted by advicepig at 11:00 AM on March 14 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I'm assuming you want to use actual fax machines and have the faxes print out as they're delivered? Because anything less than that is going to be indistinguishable from scanning documents in and emailing PDFs back and forth.

If you want to use actual fax machines, it looks like you can get a hardware device known as a T.38 Gateway that allows you to connect a standard fax machine to a VoIP service.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:14 AM on March 14 [4 favorites]

And you can usually set up all-in-one printers to scan to email. So by connecting scan to email and email to print, you might be able to make this work.
posted by ssg at 11:15 AM on March 14

I don't know of a fax machine set up but another option could be digital photo frames. You can upload photos of notes from anywhere. It wouldn't take up a huge amount of space, and could look nice on your desk etc. This of course can be done with your phone but there's something nice about sharing things off your phone.
posted by ljesse at 11:40 AM on March 14 [5 favorites]

I would agree that scanning or photographing your letter and e-mailing that is the most obvious route. But if you want something that's a closer approximation to faxing, you and your friend could both get printers with Cloud Print, get them correctly configured, and print directly to the other person's printer.

This could result in some hilarious or not-so-hilarious misunderstandings when you accidentally print to the wrong printer.
posted by adamrice at 1:34 PM on March 14

Response by poster: For clarity - I'm looking for solutions with actual fax machines, in that I want to avoid scanning documents and e-mails. My vision (which could be flawed!) is that I can pull out a piece of paper, write something quick, and then fax it over within 10 minutes, and without fiddling with scanning/emailing/screen time. My friend would receive it as a document that gets printed automatically, also without fiddling around, and she can respond the same. The idea is to avoid screens but also get same-hour responses.
posted by loonietrillium at 2:00 PM on March 14 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Solutions like Google Cloud Print still have the issue of having to fiddle around in settings and click-throughs which could, as mentioned, lead to things being sent to the wrong printer.

I'm just taken with the idea of writing something by hand and my friends receiving something physical within the hour. I also like the idea of being able to receive physical letters that just get printed in your house immediately but that you can get to at your own time, without demanding your attention with a screen alert.
posted by loonietrillium at 2:09 PM on March 14 [3 favorites]

There are printers that will scan a document and email it to someone directly through the menus on the printer itself. This is so close to sending a fax in terms of functionality that I would think it would work for your purposes.

You can then create a rule in Outlook (and probably other email software) that automatically prints email attachments upon receipt based on certain rules (like, for example, that it comes from one of the printers in your little friend network). You could also probably create this kind of automation in any one of a about a zillion desktop automation software tools, though it will likely have to be specific to each person's computer and the tools may cost money.

Getting everyone to get one of the printers that send by email is probably a few hundred dollars each - that function has descended from high end leased business copiers to things you can buy at Staples for a few hundred dollars. They might want a cheap computer that just sits around doing this, rather than installing it on their own laptop, so that's a few more dollars.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:53 PM on March 14 [2 favorites]

The VoIP route can be expensive. Basic cheap VoIP services don't support fax, plus you'd need the interface box and network savvy to set it up
posted by scruss at 3:00 PM on March 14

Someone on reddit wanted to do exactly this. The top answer suggests using Epson Email Print (YouTube demo) or another printer with similar capabilities, where your printer has its own email address, and when you email a document to that address, it will automatically get printed out.

So the workflow would be: walk over to your device (printer/scanner), scan a letter you wrote, without walking away enter an email address directly into that same device, and it will get printed automatically by the recipient's device.
posted by danceswithlight at 3:02 PM on March 14 [4 favorites]

A cheap all-in-one would still have fax functions, and connect up to a POTS phone line. But getting such a line compatible with fax may be problematic.

Personally, I would setup some sort of a system where a you write a letter, then take a picture of it, and send it to your friend's address (can be automated), then on their end, something like IFTTT take that new content, extract the attachment, and print it automatically.
posted by kschang at 3:14 AM on March 15

Recommend you get a plain paper fax bc if you fall in love with the process and results, you’ll be super sad as your correspondence vanishes from using thermal paper
posted by toodleydoodley at 10:30 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]

To expand on the email to printer, if I use my dad's HP multifunction device, I can choose scan to email and it is about as hard as using a fax machine. If the other side has a similar device configured with an email, it prints out without further interaction.

From the sender, load document and press scan to email, select the email address related to friend's printer ([e-mail]), press OK

On the other side, printer wakes up and prints if it still has ink and paper.
posted by advicepig at 8:57 AM on March 17