Email

In one sentence

Your parent’s fax number doubles as an email address. They write on paper and send a fax; it reaches the other person as an email, and when that person replies, it comes back to your parent as a fax. No computer, no smartphone, no email address to type.

The problem it solves

Your family’s conversations have moved to email and messaging apps, and your parent is the one person left out of the thread. This puts them back in it, writing to their children and grandchildren using the fax machine they already know.

How it works, end to end

1. Your parent writes on paper — the recipient and the message, by hand.
2. They send it to the Faxi number — 050-3154-8232.
3. Faxi reads the handwriting and turns it into an email.
4. The recipient gets an email — a normal email on their phone or computer, from your parent’s Faxi address.
5. The recipient replies — the way they normally do for email.
6. It comes back to your parent as a fax — the reply is turned into a clean, readable fax and delivered to them.

How Faxi knows the address — the address book

Faxi keeps an address book for your parent. For each person it remembers their email address, along with their name and relationship (daughter, grandson, doctor). You can build and manage it either way:

• You, online from the family dashboard — accurate, no typos.
• Your parent, by fax — either by writing it out (“Add contact: Tanaka Miki, miki@example.com, daughter”), or simply by emailing someone new with their address included (“Email Tanaka Miki, miki@example.com — …”). Faxi saves them automatically, so next time only the name is needed.

Once an address is saved, your parent addresses that person by name or relationship — no email address to write:

Email my daughter
“How are you? I’ll come visit soon.”

For someone not yet saved, they write out the full email address instead. If several saved people match a name, Faxi faxes back a short list to choose from. (→ Managing contacts)

Replies and continuing a conversation

The reply arrives as a readable fax with a reference number (Ref). Writing that number on a new fax continues the same conversation.

Cost and timing

• Free, no registration. Sending and receiving email is unlimited and always free — it works without the Family Plan.
• Messages and replies usually go through in a few minutes.

Good to know / limits

• Email from people they don’t know: it’s checked for spam first; safe messages arrive with a note showing who sent it and how to save them, and spam is blocked silently.
• Out-of-office and auto-replies may be held back rather than printed, to avoid wasting paper.
• A personal (“vanity”) email address is a Family Plan feature. On the free tier, the fax number itself works as the address.

How you can help

• Up front, save your own and other family members’ email addresses in their address book, so your parent can simply write “email my daughter” (→ Managing contacts).
• Have them send their first message to you. Nothing builds confidence like seeing a reply come back.