It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden.
(I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more")
Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
Why would you need a PBX line to send faxes with Asterix? You'd just need a normal phone line with a plan that includes free ("long distance") calling to the whole country, right?
Yes, I use another service + add a ton of stuff on top related to reliability, payments, and file formats. However, I have toyed with the idea of implementing my own fax sending. Maybe when I will be able to live off my side projects, I will explore this idea further.
Unfortunately, not in a business context, where marketers can claim "legitimate interest" in various ways. Also, in which way would it matter that they are illegal? Random companies keep sending them anyway; there are virtually no legal repercussions here.
Yes, I mean cold sales emails – marketers reaching out to CEOs or other decision makers, selling them staff augmentation services, growth hacking, marketing support, lead generation, design services, etc. They'd claim legitimate interest by "personalizing" the email and claiming that it is relevant for you in a business sense. (Anyway, I don't think that these are fully compliant with GDPR either, because most often, they will have scraped your email address from somewhere, and do not provide a way to unsubscribe.)
I think that they’re as illegal as they are in the US, not more. I think it’s perfectly fine to “cold-call” people but then you’re not allowed to send more emails unless they subscribe or respond.
In reality it’s very easy to end up subscribing to newsletters and even my European embassy subscribed me to their event newsletter in Thailand—of course I never agreed to any of that.
That’s not accurate. If your email is on your website, of course they can email you. If what you said was true in absolute terms, communication would be impossible.
They can contact you for legitimate reasons, which could be "hey, your website has content from me that is copyrighted" they can't contact you for sales reasons without your consent.
Definitely second that in my case. The students had troubles connecting to the school-provided Teams course and I had to deal with the justified complaints. Even though it was fully out of my controls
