Comment by jerf

The story may be posted today but there's no reason it has to be a recent story. Even the most backward government post in 2026 should have a fax-to-document service that integrates with their document tracker. But there was definitely a 15 to 20 year window from in the 1990s to somewhere in the 2010s where you could send faxes directly from a document one way or another but the recipient was almost certain to be dumping them straight to paper. The story mentions using an internet service which I am not sure would have existed in the 90s (maybe at the very end), but I extend the essence of the story back to the 90s because I remember having a modem that had a printer driver that allowed you to hit "print" and fax someone directly, which you could also easily use to do something like this without any sort of step where you're feeding paper into a physical machine.

Faxes have been "obsolete" a really long time.