Receiving Color Faxes/Emails via PC Free Mail

[TechGeek]

I have an Amish customer that uses PC Free Mail to get the emails faxed to them via their Brother MFC-9460cdw. My customer seems to be having the issue of taking 5 minutes for a 2 page email to come through and up to 3-4 hours for a 10 page email to come through. The ohter issue they are having is that the quality of the color emails are very pour. The Brother MFC-9460cdw copies great, prints great self test pages, and receives B&W faxes/email just fine. I have also put in place a brother MFC-9840cdw and this machines seems to do a better job but still is not satisfactory. I just put in place a HP OfficeJet 8610 yesterday to see if this will help any. Has anyone encounter this issue before or have any ideas on what i can do to resolved this issue? Maybe a different MFP will work i am up for any suggested MFP theat may do the trick. I was hoping to stick with a laser MFP rather then and inkjet.

[NeoMatrix]

My first impression : your customer may be using dialup fax-modem speeds with very large document sizes.
What baud rate is the MFD fax-modem set at ?
The fax baud rate most likely won't matter in anycase, the size of the documents is the issue with slow fax modem speeds.

Are they using a single copper line with dual phone/fax and broadband into the premises. Is there a broadband line filter in place between the MFD and the outside phone line ?
If there is no line filter in situ the phone/fax line will recieve a lot of unwanted broadband signals and the fax will be doing a lot of ECM; therefore could be resending missing frames/packets. It could be a problem with dirty phone line. It may be an issue of setting up the fax attenuation to the correct impedance to match the outside phone line.
Setting the correct country code in the MFD should give you all the correct settings for your fax modem.

You should attempt to set your customer up with Twain scanning directly back to their own PC, then instruct your customer to use email with internet broadband speed.

HTH

[Iowatech]

You should attempt to set your customer up with Twain scanning directly back to their own PC, then instruct your customer to use email with internet broadband speed.

HTH

It could be unlikely they have a computer. They're Amish, it's kind of amazing that they even have a fax machine.

But I agree, the size of the image data is the biggest reason the color faxes are slow. Compare the two bit image data for a black and white fax to whatever the color palette those color faxes use, and color faxes by default will take way longer than black and white ones.

On a lighter note, you might see if any of those machines has the option to receive the entire fax before printing it. I'd bet you a cup of coffee that is how they send color faxes, where the machine scans all documents and then sends the fax. It doesn't speed up the actual sending or receiving operation, but having the entire document scanned or printed all at once is easier than having to wait for each page to be processed in real time as the data is transported across the phone line. (I don't know how to do that on any of the machines you listed, so in case this is a stupid waste of time I apologize.)