Why am I receiving Faxes marked Partial
Faxes that are marked partial are marked this way because our system recognized that during the transmission there was some sort of issue during the call.
This issue could have been something like pop, and clicks, silence during the call, the call dropping when our side expected the call to continue, not hearing an “end of page” signal when we asked for one, or the senders’ side disconnected the call unexpectedly.
Normally these errors will be visible on our internal call log reports as:
Unexpected DCN after requested retransmission.
No T.30 communication on call
Unexpected DCN while waiting for image data
Disconnected after permitted retries
The call dropped prematurely
Invalid ECM response received from transmitter
These errors are issues that have to be escalated to the senders’ side service provider because the totality of the information we are able to see is those error messages, and there is very little we can do to route inbound calls.
It is worth bearing in mind that some transmission issues are to be expected with the imperfect technology that is fax transmissions. This is because the senders’ side has to convert an image file into a sound file, then send it over the telecommunications network, which has to be working correctly, and then has to be converted back from an audio file into an image file. This creates a number of potential areas for errors to occur, and relies upon the telecommunications network working correctly.
If you are experiencing a high rate of faxes marked partial we would suggest reaching out to the sender and requesting that they escalate the issue to their service provider, as well as confirm that they have ECM or Error Correction Mode enabled.