Fax Services On-line

Perhaps fax machines and sending and receiving faxes are fading fast, but many of us still deal with companies by fax. Most corporations still use and even require certain documents via fax. Some folks don’t feel comfortable with email and some don’t know how to attach documents in an email!

We ditched our landline earlier this year and now use T-Mobile’s @home service. We still have our old land-line phone number, but we can’t use it to fax, bummer. That’s when I became interested in what was out there for faxing from my computer.

First, I have to say if you have documents generated on your computer, internet faxing is a quick, inexpensive and convenient way to send your information directly to a fax machine where it prints out just like you fed it through a machine on your end.

Here’s a place to look at several fax reviews. These all come with a monthly fee, but it’s much less per month than paying for your phone line and the ink your fax machine guzzles each month. Have you priced your local print shop, Staples or Office Depot for their fax fees? Our local Staples quoted me about $1/page and the guy told me the prices were pretty much the same around town.I think he was embarrassed to tell me the price, but I’m glad he warned me before I had to shell out $12 for my fax.  What a racket!

If you’re looking for free faxing, efax allows free incoming faxes.   It’s hard to find this feature on their site anymore, but you can use the link. You’ll be assigned a number, but don’t expect to get one in your area code. If you sign up for the pay accounts, then that is available. I believe you have to receive a fax at least once a month to keep your number.

I recently found FaxZero and really like it, with a couple of reservations. I like it because you can send two free faxes a day with a limit of 3 pages each. The three pages can be text you type or documents. There are two shortcomings: they accept only .doc, .docx, or .pdf and only one document per fax. So an excel or picture file can’t be sent with FaxZero. The other is that only one document can be attached per fax. Even with their premium service, only one document can be attached. Their premium service is $1.99 per fax with a limit of 15 pages/1 document per fax. It’s great if you can get everything into one document. But this is too limiting for me.

The fax service I found that allows multiple documents to be attached and supports up to 178 file formats is myfax. Their lowest plan is $10/month, which seems to be a great deal if you fax more than 10 pages a month.

I’ve used both efax and FaxZero and they’ve both worked just fine. For my needs, I still need a stand alone fax machine from time to time to send documents not on my computer. Luckily, I have a friend at a near by office who allows me the use their machine for free.

Random Posts

• September 4, 2009 -- Windows Live Movie Maker vs. Picasa
• March 7, 2008 -- GoToAssist – a Remote Support Program
• April 17, 2008 -- You Send It – More About the Lite Version
• April 22, 2010 -- Firefox Xmarks-Sync Bookmarks Across Computers