Do you consider the fax machine high technology or barely technology? The first successful fax test was done in 1863 (yes, 1863). But while many people, including me, don't have much use for faxes, entire industries remain legally bound to them. But at least you can use a hosted fax service and get away from stand-alone fax machines.

Why are industries like real estate, medicine, insurance and legal firms tethered to faxes? Because a faxed signature is considered a legal signature, while a scanned and e-mailed document is not considered legal. Ask your legislators if you wonder how a page with a signature scanned and sent via e-mail isn't legal, but that same page scanned and uploaded to a fax service is. Logical or not, that's the law, and no one seems in a hurry to change that.

So if you're going to use faxes, are there ways to modernize and better manage those faxes? According to MyFax, the hosted model works wonderfully. They gave me an account so I could send and receive a few faxes and judge for myself.

MyFax hosted service accepts scanned pages, or any type of computer file for that matter, into its outgoing fax application. Want to send one or a thousand? Login, type in the number and a name (or pick one from your online address book), upload the file, and click send. The fax goes out nearly immediately, and MyFax sends you an e-mail with reference and billing numbers verifying delivery of the fax to some type of fax machine at the far end.

When I say "some type of fax machine" on the far end, it might in fact be another fax service. My friend Alan uses eFax, a competitor to MyFax. The sample file he and I sent back and forth maintained much better quality between MyFax and eFax than it did going out to and coming back from a standard fax machine owned by my friend LaRee.

My dislike of faxes comes from the inability to use the information, beyond reading the page, once I receive it. If you send me a document in RTF (Rich Text Format), I can cut and paste that information. If you send me a digital image rather than a fax of the image, I can use the image at the original resolution and quality after I receive it. Of course, the ability to modify what I receive is exactly the reason only faxes carry full legal weight as an authorized signature.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.