Hi!
Can you tell us how many rings your fax machine is set to "hear" before
it answers the line? Also, does your fax machine always answer in the
same number of rings?
If the machine isn't always answering at the same number of rings, you
might check any settings it could have for distinctive ringing service.
If a distinctive ringing pattern has somehow been configured, it could
cause unpredictable answering behavior from your fax machine if you
don't have distinctive ringing service.
Finally, if the machine is working right and the ringing options (if it
has them) are set up properly, I might suggest distinctive ringing
service. This is a service your phone company can (in most cases)
provide for low or no cost to you. I've gone with distinctive ringing
on my own fax machine as it was much less error-prone than mistakenly
picking up the phone only to hear that it was a fax, and so far it has
been much less trouble than the special "code boxes" that let you type
a code if you mistakenly pick up the phone on a fax call.
The way it works is quite simple. Fax machine, phone and answering
machine all remain on the same phone line. But your phone company
assigns a second number to that line. When someone calls that number,
the phone rings differently. My fax machine is configured to pick up
only when it hears the special ring pattern. If your fax machine
supports this feature, you won't have to worry about it picking when it
should not. Nor will you have to worry about mistakenly picking up a
fax call.
The only caveat to this approach is that your fax machine MUST support
distinctive ringing service. So far I have found that Lexmark and
Brother multifunction devices don't.
- see
http://greyghost.dyndns.org/fax.htm for my rant on the
subject...
If nothing else, you can always turn off the auto-answer feature. That
should stop the machine from picking anything up unless you
specifically tell it to do so.
William
