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Businesses Try to Gut Junk Fax Ban
An anonymous reader writes "The Telephone Consumer Protection Act prohibits junk faxes without first obtaining consent of the recipient but EPIC is reporting a bill is being proposed by congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) to allow junk faxes that are now prohibited and to undo new rules that go into effect January 2005 that would have further tightened the junk fax ban. In keeping with congressional truth in naming rules, this bill that will allow more junk faxes is understandably titled 'The Junk Fax Elimination Act of 2004.' There will be a hearing Tuesday in the Telecommunications and Internet subcommittee. I'll be faxing my concerns and opposition to this bill to Mr. Upton and the Committee several times today."
From http://www.house.gov/upton/contact.htm :
If you are sending mail to the Washington office, please fax your correspondence to (202) 225-4986. If you prefer, you may mail your correspondence to either District office and your mail will be forwarded to Washington.
Kalamazoo Office
157 South Kalamazoo Mall
Suite 180
Kalamazoo, MI 49006
(269) 385-0039
(269) 385-2888 fax
St. Joseph Office
800 Ship Street
Suite 106
St. Joseph, MI 49085
(269) 982-1986
(269) 982-0237 fax
Washington D.C. Office
2161 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-3761
(202) 225-4986 fax
How hard is it to filter calls from junk fax senders? There must be some solutions for this out there.
How can a machine tell the difference between junk fax and a valid fax?
Fax messages don't have email headers. You can't parse the links or check the embedded images.
You can either try to go by the source's phone number (if that information is even available) or try to route all fax traffic through a computer, perform OCR, and then actually print whatever you can't be sure isn't spax (sfam?).
You could even try a distributed approach (again, if you route traffic through a computer) if you're willing to let others know who's faxing you.
Bottom line - filtering isn't easy, and we shouldn't have to resort to it.
I used to work at an electronics store and we were constantly bombarded by junk faxes. My solution was to enable the access code feature that our fax machine/answering machine was equipped with and I recorded a message with instructions on how to fax and the correct access code. Not all fax machines have this feature, but our Panasonic model did.
It wasn't a perfect solution, but those that regularly wanted to fax us were aware of the code, those that did not obviously were rejected. Our junk fax percentage went from 80-90% to 0% instantly.