Is Fax More Secure Than Email? What T.38 Gets Right
In 2025, 170 healthcare organizations reported email-related breaches to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In a separate Paubox survey of healthcare IT leaders, 58% said their organization had been breached through email in the past 24 months, and 23% said it had happened more than once.
Encryption controls only work when people use them. In the same survey, more than a third of organizations that require a portal login to read encrypted email said clinical staff bypass it. That raises a question we hear often from the organizations we work with: is fax actually more secure?
The short answer is yes, and the reasons are architectural, not sentimental. But the full answer depends on what kind of fax you're talking about.
Why RightFax Fax Failures Aren't a RightFax Problem
We've spent over two decades building fax server software. Our parent company, iFAX Solutions, ships HylaFAX Enterprise to organizations that depend on fax at scale. We know what these systems can do when they're connected to infrastructure that respects T.30, the fax protocol.
So when a new customer tells us their fax server "doesn't work over SIP," we already know the shape of the story. Sometimes it's a RightFax or HylaFAX Enterprise installation that ran fine for years on POTS or PRI, migrated to a SIP trunk, and started failing. Sometimes it's a brand-new deployment, built on SIP from day one, with no legacy fax history to compare against. Either way, the pattern is the same: pages drop mid-transmission, calls connect but nothing comes through, and the SIP provider's advice is to lower the baud rate, turn off ECM, and try again.
The fax server was never the problem.
What Lumen's Voice Exit Means for Your Fax Lines
A customer told us about it before we read about it. Lumen, the carrier behind the CenturyLink, Level 3, Qwest, and Embarq brands, has stopped selling and renewing business voice service. If your company has phone lines on Lumen, your contract now has an end date with no renewal behind it.
Most of the coverage so far is about replacing the phones. This post is about the fax lines, which tend to get one bullet point in a migration plan and then cause most of the trouble after cutover.