LetterAgent
Mail physical letters by just asking your AI assistant.
Good fax etiquette means sending to the right person at a reasonable hour, with a short cover note, a clear page count, and one polite confirmation check. It respects a shared machine, a busy office, and a recipient who may not have asked for a fax at all.
Email lands in a personal inbox. A fax lands on a shared machine, prints on shared paper, and sits on a shared tray where anyone passing by can see it. A long, mistimed, or misaddressed fax wastes other people's supplies and risks exposing private content to the wrong eyes. That is why the old courtesies around faxing still matter: they protect the recipient's time, their paper, and their privacy, not just your own reputation. A careful sender also gets faster results, because office staff route a well-labelled fax quickly and set aside a confusing one.
A cover note is a short first page that tells the recipient what follows and what to do with it. Keep it to a few lines: your name and contact details, the recipient's name, the date, the document title, the total page count including the cover, and one line on the action you need, such as "Please file with case 123" or "Please confirm receipt." If the fax is urgent, say why in one sentence and give a deadline, rather than writing "urgent" alone. Never put sensitive details on the cover note itself: the cover is the page most likely to be seen by someone other than the intended reader.
| Cover note item | Why it helps |
|---|---|
| Recipient name and department | Staff can route it without opening the document |
| Total page count | Recipient can tell at once if pages are missing |
| Document title and date | Prevents confusion with earlier versions |
| Your phone or email | Recipient can confirm receipt or report a fault |
| Action requested, in one line | Removes guesswork about what you want |
Send during the recipient's business hours unless they asked for an overnight send. A fax that arrives at midnight prints, sits, and may be cleared away with other paper before the right person arrives. Very long faxes deserve a warning: a quick call or message saying "a 20-page fax is coming this afternoon" lets the office load paper and watch for it. Avoid sending the same fax twice "just in case" without saying so; duplicates create filing confusion and double the recipient's paper use. If you resend, label it clearly as a resend and note which pages it contains.
One confirmation check is good manners; three is pestering. For routine faxes, your own confirmation page is usually enough, and you need not call at all. For time-sensitive or important faxes, wait a reasonable interval, then make a single brief check by phone or email: "Did the five-page fax I sent this morning reach you complete?" If the answer is yes, stop there. If the recipient says it is incomplete, resend only the missing pages with a new cover note. Repeated follow-ups within the same day signal anxiety, not diligence, and they cost the recipient time they could spend acting on your fax.
Think twice before faxing anything with personal identifiers, financial details, or medical information to a shared machine, and never fax such material to a number you have not verified. Confirm the number from an official source, not from memory or an old email signature, since fax numbers change when offices move. In both the US and Canada, unsolicited marketing faxes are restricted by law, so never use fax for advertising to people who did not ask for it. And never fax a document you would not want read by a stranger in the office: if the content needs that level of privacy, ask the recipient for a safer channel first.
LetterAgent fax is available in testing for US and Canadian numbers, with a per-fax quote and a page count verified before you approve the total. The same courtesies apply to a service-sent fax: give the assistant the correct recipient, a clear document title, and a page count you have checked, so the cover and the confirmation both tell a clean story.
Ready to fax it? Fax with LetterAgent: describe it to your AI assistant, approve the exact quoted price, and it is sent.
LetterAgent is a working name. Prices include print, postage, and our service fee. US prices in USD, Canadian prices in CAD (Canadian prices exclude applicable sales tax, added at checkout). Currently in private testing.
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