I Wish Someone Would Invent: An Email-to-Fax System

Fax machines are the last holdouts of a previous generation of technology. With email capable of sending higher-resolution pictures faster, with un-garbled text and a searchable and organizable system for telling who it came from, fax machines have been completely left in the dust, capabilities-wise. Why do they hold on? My theory is that the immediateness of the piece of paper printing out of the machine means you can deal with it in the real world, instead (if it's not your thing) of being on the computer, dinking around with computer things. That makes sense for places like Auto Repair Garages or something like that. It's standardized. So I get it.

But if you start a new business today, no matter how tech-savvy you are, you have to buy a fax machine or have ready access to one so that you can send the one fax a month that has to get to some caveman at a tax office somewhere THIS AFTERNOON. I hate that.

So what I propose is that someone, somewhere, create an email code or relay of some sort so that you could send an email to (for instance) 6125551234@email2fax.com, and have that automatically send your text, with any accompanying images, to the fax number (612) 555-1234. Maybe you have to send jpegs of only a certain pixel dimension, maybe you need a specific standardized template so that it'll go to every fax machine, but something, anything, so that I don't have to use our crappy, temperamental 3-in-one to fax, or receive a fax, ever again.

UPDATE: INVENTED!
Whoops, that's got to be a record. Dan Olson points me to this site where there are so many fax-to-email-to-fax programs that I shan't even attempt to list them.