question

dawn2864 avatar image
dawn2864 asked bjsvec answered

Fax: Are RingCentral faxes secure?

Our company sends documents to the IRS on behalf of our clients on a regular basis. One of our employees just received a scolding from an IRS rep stating that use of the RingCentral fax is not secure and that is not a method to use for sending them information. The rep stated that we need to be using a traditional fax machine. Is the IRS rep correct in stating this?

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bjsvec avatar image
bjsvec answered dawn2864 commented
That sounds pretty suspect to me.  Maybe an agent having a bad day..  As far as I can tell, RC fax is equally secure if not more so than a standard fax machine.  With RC at least the leg between the sender and RC is encrypted.  

Besides that, how would they know?  Just tell them you are using a standard fax machine from 1991!
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dawn2864 avatar image dawn2864 commented ·
My thoughts exactly!

We've been on RingCentral for a year now and have never had any problems from the IRS. The general public and businesses do not use top secret secure phone lines when using traditional fax machines to send information. So, as far as I'm concerned, traditional fax machines are not secure.
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Josh Fields avatar image
Josh Fields answered
How would they know?  If using email-to-fax, I think that the coverpage or the TO part shows " outgoingnumber@rcfax.com" or similar as the fax number, so the person that receives it can figure out that it comes from RC.  I think you can change that behavior by using a name with the address like "outgoingnumber < outgoingnumber@rcfax.com>"  and then it just shows outgoing number (or whatever you replace there).

Insecure?  It's possibly the email part of it that they consider to be insecure, if you are using email to send the faxes, not the fax part of it being insecure.  The email part could be secure, though, if both the sender and the receiver of the email allows SSL/TLS email connections.  RC sends email out over a SSL/TLS connection if the receiving side supports it, I assume they also accept SSL/TLS connections as well, but so far I have only confirmed the emails sent from RC, not the emails received by RC.  I haven't done any outgoing email-to-fax yet, only incoming fax-to-email.


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