Every Phaxio feature is built for a reason. Some features we build intuitively, but most have initially been requested by our users. No feature has been more widely asked for than the Cancel Timeout feature.

We created cancel timeouts specifically for restaurant ordering apps. Restaurant ordering requires very fast turnaround times, and many users wanted to guarantee that a fax would succeed or fail within a certain maximum time constraint.

For example, a restaurant ordering network may estimate that if a fax completes within eight minutes, the receiving restaurant will have enough time to make and deliver an order to a customer. However, a ten minute delay might make the order late and require an account manager to call the restaurant to make sure that the fax machine was working properly.

So how does a cancel timeout work?

You can now specify the number of minutes before Phaxio automatically cancels your fax in the cancel_timeout parameter of a sendFax call. You can also globally specify this setting for your account on your Fax Settings page.

As Voltaire said (or maybe we learned from Spiderman) “With great power comes great responsibility.” There are some important things to keep in mind when using a cancel timeout.

1. If you’re using a long batch_delay when sending, we will appropriately increase your cancel_timeout in order to insure we can be on the line long enough to transmit your fax.
2. We generally recommend allocating 1 minute of transmission time per page. This means if you are typically sending 5 page faxes, your cancel_timeout should be at least 5 minutes.

Have any more feature requests? Let’s talk!