Better fax support for OS/X

I’ve always been a bit puzzled as to why Apple doesn’t put just a little bit more effort into its fax support in OS/X (well, perhaps they will in 10.5 — there have been good strides in the past few releases). OS/X’s support for faxing is probably just fine for occasional office or personal use. In fact, I’ve used it while on the road to receive and send faxes from my PowerBook just fine — and loved it.

Unfortunately, it’s just not quite good enough for typical office use. The shortcomings really don’t seem like they would be hard to address:

• Support for faxing to more than a few recipients at one time.
• Better logging and diagnostics so that I can see who got their faxes and, more importantly who didn’t, easily and reliably.
• Smart dialing (that is handling area codes, prefixes and country codes reasonably well).
• Better scheduling support, particularly being able to designate allowable fax hours (for instance, send faxes between 9:00pm and 6:00am only).

That’s probably about it. Already OS/X does a great job on fax reception. It emails me a copy of my incoming fax, which is perfect for my needs. But the inability to send to a large distribution list is a real killer — that, and not really knowing whether those faxes I scheduled made it out reliably or not.

Fortunately, there’s a great little product that addresses all of these issues. And for $29 pagersender, by Smile On My Mac, is a fantastic buy.

Pagesender ups the ante by improving your OS/X fax integration. You have more options for printing and emailing your faxes — and even triggering Applescript events to handle them.

Perhaps most significant is its integration with Address Book, Entourage, Now Contact, Outlook Express and Palm Desktop for fax addresses. You can even create tab-delimited lists of fax recipients and drag the text file into your pagesender fax window — that’s all it takes to handle fairly large distribution lists. It took only a few minutes to create a list of 150 recipients and see the faxes start to roll out. Smile On My Mac does recommend that you limit your bulk faxing to “a couple hundred” at a time, noting that the print architecture really isn’t designed to handle more. I gave a bulk fax of 300 recipients a try and was a bit disappointed to see pagesender’s print queue freeze up. However, if you aren’t sending more than a couple hundred faxes at a time this is the perfect solution (at least, until Apple does the right thing and builds this functionality into OS/X).

I haven’t tried using pagesender with a third party fax service but that’s supported as well. eFax, jConnect, EasyLink and MaxEmail are all listed in the “Fax Using” select box.

Unfortunately, as wonderful as it is, pagesender isn’t an industrial strength office faxing application. For this we can turn to FAX stf Pro from Smith Micro, starting at $89.95. Version 10.7 addresses many of the issues that other users of the software have complained about — the most significant being that it was “clunky” or did not integrate well with the clean OS/X experience. The latest release isn’t quite as slick and easy to use as pagesender but it does provide the industrial grade capabilities needed for large-scale faxing.

Among its strengths over pagesender are much improved fax history reporting, per-fax logs (pagesender has one huge log file), better fax monitoring, better handling of multiple fax devices and the ability to handle very large fax jobs. It also handles background faxing (in contrast, you must leave pagesender running) and has great OS/X themed fax status panels. FAX stf Pro Server goes even further, providing centralized contact database management and other workgroup-oriented features.

My only real gripe with the FAX stf Pro user experience is that it doesn’t give me quite as much control as I’d like and the user interface still shows a few of those clunky bits during configuration and setup. For instance, it insists on using a full half-inch for the fax header, and changing an existing cover page template requires a rather tedious process of choosing another default template, deleting the cover page, editing it, adding it back, and making it default again. But, once the setup and configuration is done you won’t have to deal with it again.

There are two things that really disappointed me with FAX stf Pro, though. First, it does not handle intelligent dialing, a feature that I love in pagesender. FAX stf Pro will dial the fax number exactly as it appears in your database. Pagesender had a great ability to parse the number and handle long distance dialing codes, country codes and area code inclusion or exclusion based on your locale. Given all of the other industrial strength features in FAX stf Pro this was a disappointing surprise. Another disappointment was that FAX stf Pro supports very large fax jobs, but it doesn’t have a user interface that makes it easy to queue them up. With pagesender, I could create a text file or grab a group from Address Book. Unfortunately, FAX stf Pro doesn’t support dragging a delimited text file and it’s handling of Address Book groups did not work reliably (it seemed to have problems handling groups with more than a few hundred recipients at one time). The alternative — manually checking off a long list of recipients — was very tedious and not really workable for large distributions.

So, in the end I find myself hoping that 10.5 will incorporate the best of pagesender and FAX stf Pro. Apple would be well served to put some attention on industrial-grade fax support. In the meantime, I find myself leaning a bit toward pagesender. While I’m not thrilled at having to queue up fax jobs a couple hundred recipients at a time, it’s not that hard with a little bit of creative sed and split text file processing. I’m sure I’ll miss FAX stf Pro’s detailed per-fax logging, although pagesender really isn’t that bad in this regard. It tells me why the fax didn’t go through — looking at the transmission log is probably not too urgent a need. As for having to leave pagesender running — well, I never logout anyhow.