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A fax confirmation that says OK only means the two machines completed their handshake; it says nothing about whether a person ever saw the pages. The usual culprits are a wrong extension, a fax that landed in a machine nobody checks, a full paper tray, or an office that was closed. Call the recipient, confirm the exact fax number and extension, and resend.
| What you see | Likely cause | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| OK, but nobody saw it | Wrong extension or department | Confirm the exact number and extension by phone |
| OK, but nobody saw it | Shared machine nobody monitors | Ask who checks the machine and how often |
| OK, but nothing printed | Empty paper tray; pages held in memory | Ask them to load paper and print stored faxes |
| OK, sent after hours | Office closed; fax sat overnight | Resend during business hours and ask them to watch for it |
| OK to a fax-to-email number | Went to an inbox nobody checks | Ask them to check the right inbox and spam folder |
Only that the two machines completed the call. Your machine dialed, the other end answered, the pages transmitted without a line error, and the receiving machine acknowledged receipt. That handshake is the entire universe the confirmation page knows about. It knows nothing about what happened after: whether the pages printed, whether the tray had paper, whether the fax went to the right department, or whether anyone picked it up. "OK" is a statement about the phone call, not about delivery to a human being.
There is a whole geography of lost faxes. Shared office machines in copy rooms that everyone walks past and nobody checks. Machines with empty paper trays that politely store incoming pages in memory indefinitely. Fax-to-email numbers whose inbox belongs to someone who left the company. Wrong extensions that route your pages to a different department's machine, where they sit until someone curious reads them. In every one of these cases, the sender's confirmation is truthful and the recipient's "we never got it" is also truthful. Both sides are right, and the pages are sitting somewhere unclaimed.
Call. There is no substitute. Ask the recipient to check the machine, the paper tray, and any fax-to-email inbox while you are on the phone, and confirm the exact number and extension during the same call. Then resend to the confirmed number and ask them to stand by the machine. For anything important, this two-minute call beats any confirmation page ever printed. It also catches the embarrassing cases early: the transposed digit, the old number from a website that was never updated, the extension that changed when the office moved.
If you send through an online fax service such as LetterAgent, the same rule applies: a successful send on the service's side still needs a human check on the receiving side for anything important. Note that LetterAgent's fax service is currently in testing, so check with your assistant about current availability rather than assuming a fax can go out today.
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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