The death of faxes has been greatly exaggerated. While e-mail has certainly reduced the volume of faxes sent and received today, the venerable fax simply refuses to disappear entirely. Many companies, after all, still require signed faxes rather than e-mail, and that means you’re probably stuck with an old fax machine and perhaps an expensive phone line that you use only occasionally. The solution: move your faxing to the Internet and ditch the machine. Read on to learn how.
Q: How do online fax services work?
A: Online fax services that are capable of taking the place of your fax machine provide you with a dedicated “virtual” telephone number so that people who wish to send you a fax can do so as they always have: simply by calling a normal phone number. When you receive a fax, you’ll typically be notified by e-mail, and optionally the e-mail may contain a PDF attachment of the fax itself. And because the phone number is “virtual,” you don’t actually have to have an extra phone line in your home or office, nor do you have to pay for one.
The best Internet fax services also, however, allow you to send a fax either from a web form or by attaching a document to an e-mail message and addressing it to the recipient’s fax number. For instance, if you have a fax account with the fictitious provider FaxCompany.com, you would probably simply address an e-mail message containing an attachment to [email protected]. FaxCompany.com would recognize the e-mail address from which you sent the fax as a valid account and then send your attachment or e-mail as a normal fax.
Most online fax services will keep records of your sent and received faxes, as well — and offer you numerous amenities that you could never replicate with a dedicated…