I'm afraid the fax machine is here to stay, at least for a while longer.  I sometimes deal with businesses like banks and law firms that tend to be conservative in their practices, and they nearly always ask me to "fax it over".  This is the way they usually want to receive copies of documents with signatures, and they often refuse to allow scanned documents to be sent by email.  As much as I hate to admit it, by the time I've scanned an existing document and attached it to an email, I've spent about as much time as I would walking it over to the fax machine, perhaps more.  I have tried efax, an online virtual fax machine that worked well, but the need to pay monthly fees makes it a tough sell at my office in light of the cost of a basic fax machine being less that $100.  In addition, it was only a significant time saver for the outgoing documents that I was faxing directly from my Word files.  One neat feature that I liked was that incoming faxes were converted to emails, and I found that much more convenient than taking repeated field trips to Ye Olde Fax Machine to check for the document I was expecting.  The virtual fax is also more environmentally friendly, and helps keep you from wasting paper every time some company sends out a fax blast to promote itself.  You might want to check out www.faxcompare.com to see if any of the online fax services can meet your needs.