Fax services

[Paul Brinkmeyer]

Any good or bad internet faxing services anyone cares to comment on?
I am in the proccess of researching and sure could use some advice.
I would like to use it with my E-mail.

Thanks

[Burt Alcantara]

My wife uses callwave.com. They "translate" email to fax and fax to email. This is part of her business. I believe it's about $10 per month.

Burt

[Matt Meiser]

My company uses eFax for all faxes. Our corporate fax number is a paid account. Everyone else (almost 40 of us) has a free account because most of us are lucky to receive 5 pages of fax per year, especially with many copiers scanning to PDF now for emailing. If we have a big fax coming, we just tell the sender to send it to the corporate fax number. The free accounts generate a couple pieces of spam mail from eFax a month, a small price to pay, and you can't choose your area code. I got an Orlando area code, but anymore no one is surprised.

eFax delivers to your email and there's a special viewer. I convert anything I need to save to PDF using PDFCreator.

[Rob Cooper]

I have used Efax for a few years. It has been very reliable and you can set the service to send your faxes in PDF format for pda/cell and easy distribution.

Matt, you may not be able to set to convert to pdf on the free account

I think the service is just under $20/mo.

[Lee Schierer]

Why not just get a fax modem for your computer? If you have a scanner and a printer you already have most of what is needed. The best part is you can view incoming faxes on the screen and delete the junk mail.

[Matt Meiser]

Couple reasons why eFax is better, at least in my case
- No need for an extra phone line or one of those devices that auto-switch. The latter wouldn't work anyway with phone compnay voicemail.
- No need for the computer to be on and plugged in. Especially an issue with a laptop.
- I can receive faxes wherever I am

Rob, I'll have to find my login information and check to see if that setting is there. Edit: PDF is a paid account feature.

[Paul Brinkmeyer]

With E-fax, do you have to use E-fax software?
What format is it delvered in it's native form?
I do not need to send to PDA or anything, just veiw and print.

Burt...same questioins for callwave.

FYI, I need a virtual number, not a real one as I have no more physical lines left, so using the computer and modem is not really workable. I can not share a current line as my current landlines are transfered all over the place to different cells and we just do not carry a fax around. A fax service also looks to be less than a new phone line anyway.

thanks for your help everone.

[James Jaragosky]

I do not use it but I believe that yahoo has a fax service connected to its IM / phone suite. around $19 a year + call time.
I would check Google as well.

lycos.globe7.com is a beta phone program that gives you a free us number that can receive faxes, convert them to pfd files and email them to you. they have low phone rates I think you can fax out also.

TRY fax1.com
set up a account with $10 and only pay when you send a page, no monthly fee, so it's excellent for occasional use.

I tried skype to fax once; and it works poorly.

[Matt Meiser]

If you have the paid version of efax, it will deliver PDFs to you, so no eFax software. With unpaid, I need their software.

I send faxes from my multifunction printer which is plugged into my office line. Honestly I fax more for personal reasons (insurance forms and the like) than for business.

[Mike Henderson]

Why not just get a fax modem for your computer? If you have a scanner and a printer you already have most of what is needed. The best part is you can view incoming faxes on the screen and delete the junk mail.
The problem is incoming faxes. Almost all modern fax machines put a tone on the line as soon as the other side picks up (called "calling tone"). This allows the receiver to determine if the incoming call is a fax call or a voice call.

But when you put the fax on your regular phone line, you tend to pick up the phone when it rings, and even if you hear the calling tone, you can't switch the computer to answer the call (and receive the fax).

To make it work easily, you have to have a separate fax number that only the computer picks up. And that separate fax number costs a significant amount of money. That's why an Internet fax service is so good. They give you a number to give to people to send you a fax, then they deliver the fax to you.

Of course, to send a fax, it's no problem to only have one line.

Mike

[Just in case anyone is interested, when a fax machine answers a call, it puts a tone on the line called "answer tone" which lets the other side know that it contacted a fax machine and can begin the training and negotiation process. You've almost certainly heard answer tone when you made a mistake and dialed the fax number on someone's business card, instead of their voice number. You hear what sounds like "beep", "beep"...]