Believe it or not, fax technology (in one form or another) has been around for over a hundred years. For some reason, it hasn’t been replaced by a simpler, more reliable, digital method.

If you have a 95% success rate on your faxes, it’s pretty good, and the other 5% will retry until it goes through. One of the better ways to handle incoming faxes is to store them digitally, saving a great deal of paper.Most smaller $200 fax machines won’t do this, so don’t try to find the feature on them. When you get into the business-class multifunction devices though, you usually have a way to do it. I’ve been working to prepare several dozen offices for the switch to digital storage of inbound faxes and I’ve found that not all manufacturers call it the same thing.

HP and Muratek call it archiving, Toshiba and Konica and Kyocera call it forwarding. Either way, its simply storing an incoming fax to a digital file, usually a PDF. Here’s where to find it on these models of fax machines.

HP M series MFPs: Click Fax Settings then click the Advanced button in the right pane. You can choose to archive to a network folder there. Do not expect this to work reliably on the M4555 series MFPs. It doesn’t and your system will probably crash with a 49.38.07 error within about a dozen faxes or so.

Muratek: Under Administration, click Archiving

Toshiba: login as Admin and go to Administration, Registration then Fax Received Forward.

Konica: Login as admin, go to Fax/Scan, RX Document(on left), then click Port below it. Choose G3 (that’s the fax port) and choose where to send them.

Kyocera: Click Fax/i-Fax at the top, then RX/Forward Requirements at the left. On the Kyoceras, if it was made before 2007 or so, you’ll need a new firmware to get it to authenticate to a shared folder on a windows domain.