fax machines and BT call minder

[Katherine]

Totally non-child related but wondered if anyone had any experiences of fax machines. I work from home and have at long last got a fax, however I've had problems connecting it as I have call minder on the line so I can take messages when online. It seems I can either set it to take faxes in which case call minder never clicks in, or can set it only to recieve manual faxes and only then will call minder work. But this means I can only receive a fax if I'm expecting it which sor tof defeats the object. Anyone else had this problem and is there a way round it?

Does nobody else have this problem?

Had a answer phone/fax machine incompatibility problem as DH works from home. Will let you know what we did to sort it when I've found out from DH.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be much help to you after all Katherine. Sorry At our previous house we had a telephone/answer machine combined in the main socket downstairs and the fax/phone and another phone upstairs and we couldn't get the two compatible.

But when we moved to this house we got a cable run from just outside the house into the bedroom DH uses as an office making this the first phone on the line (apparently this is significant and it does start to ring about a second before the others). We also bought a separate answer phone which is plugged in with the fax machine into the same socket with the answer phone set to 4 rings and the fax to 6 rings. And it works - the answer phone must recognise the fax and cut out leaving the fax to pick it up. But if we use the modem (and I also work from home on call a few evenings a month - logged into my work) then this engages our line. I don't really know it works with call minder though, I'm afraid. Still this will refresh your thread and hopefully someone else will have more useful advise

I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that Call Minder can't be used with a fax machine. It might have been in Which?

Why don't you ring BT and ask them?

Katherine do you have an email connection at home? You can set up a fax number "online" where the fax is emailed to you as an attachment - this is what we do and it works fine. We use efax (www.efax.com), but I'm sure there are others.