Your web application moves at the speed of the Internet, but your faxes are constrained by the power of telephone networks. The problem is that fax machines can only accept one call at a time, but your web application needs to send many files within a very short period of time.

For example, imagine that you’re a restaurant ordering application. You’ll most likely receive the most orders between 2pm and 3pm, and many of those orders will be going to the same restaurants. Say you receive 12 orders at 1:45 pm that need to be filled by Joe’s Pizza by 2pm. You need to fax these orders off ASAP. Most likely your application fires faxes off as the orders are received. There’s only one problem: Joe’s Pizza only has one fax line, and you’re constantly receiving failures because your faxes are competing with each other to get through!

Batch your faxes!

Our solution? Batching multiple faxes into a single phone call. When you send a fax with the batch parameter set to true, we won’t send your file as soon as you give it to us. Instead, we’ll wait for more files to come in for the same number. Then, when you’re ready to release the fax, we’ll send all the files to the recipient in one phone call.

There are multiple ways to release the fax from batching mode. One way is to to use the batch_delay parameter when sending a fax. This will automatically send whatever files exist in the fax after the batch_delay seconds expire. You can also use the API and call the releaseFax operation. Another is to click the “Release Fax” button in the web console.

In our restaurant ordering example above, the developer could specify batch=true and batch_delay=60 when sending faxes with Phaxio. If all 12 orders are received in the same minute, they would all be part of the same “batch” to Joe’s Pizza and one call would be placed 60 seconds later with all of the orders! Amazing!

Check out the batching docs.