I don't want to derail the other thread about the best printer, so I hope this is ok. I'm not really up on the never ending tech advances. I do have a Brother HL-L2380DW machine, all I have used it for is printing.

I had to fax 5 pages and it cost me almost $13 to do so. I thought that was outrageous.

I'm under the impression that faxing is about gone, and everyone is emailing attachments nowadays. Maybe that's wrong, I don't know.

I no longer have a home phone line, so a traditional fax machine is out.

How do the 4 in one machines work, the print-copy-scan-fax, how does the fax work? Does it send it through the internet? I went to a couple of office supply stores today (you know, the usual suspect big box stores) and got different answers from sales clerks. One said no phone line is required, one says you must have a phone line plugged into it.

I just think I should pick up a machine that can fax, if it can do so through the internet to a fax machine on the other end, if that's how it works?

I'm aware that it is possible to scan something into a PDF and email it as an attachment, although I've never done that. Yet.

What do yall think? Keep paying close to $3 bucks a page when I do have to fax something, or what other option is available?

Internet faxing requires a subscription of some sort. The fax starts as a scan, is emailed to a server, then the server dials out to the recipient's fax machine. The process is reversed, and faxes are delivered to your email. The pricing is outrageous, usually more than a phone line costs.


The multifunction scanner/printer/fax requires a telephone line. I've not seen a multifunction machine that can circumvent the need for all either a subscription, as above, or a telephone line.

Faxes have not died. The IRS, for example, does not use email. If you have correspondence, then your option is to mail it or fax it.

My Brother MFC faxes over the land line.

Since I no longer have a home phone line to plug into, it seems as if I should either pony up the rip off charge to pay someone else to fax it for me, but before that I should definitely ask whoever wants the fax if I can scan it and email it to them instead.

Yup, scan and email may be your best bet. I fax quite a bit and retain my landline through my cable provider just for it.
You can fax with a hardwire setup. Either traditional phone line, voice over cable, or maybe fiber. But you can't use a voip service like Vonage.

Do you have a smartphone?

You can get both scanning and faxing apps, I use TurboScan and FaxBurner on my iPhone. Both work great.