Faxing Hits the Internet

In days of old, sending documents across the country required big, bulky fax machines that chewed up reams of paper and slurped ink. Then, the PC and faxing software brought organization to the faxing community and got rid of the mounds of wasted resources. The latest wave of faxing technology, Internet faxing, is even more efficient.

Internet faxing is a completely different thing from PC fax applications such as WinFax Pro. With PC applications, you use your modem to dial out to your target’s phone, which is usually a long distance phone call. With Internet faxing, however, there are no long distance charges because you’re sending and receiving faxes through your Internet service provider (ISP) and the Internet. Anyone struggling with one phone line will instantly recognize the benefits of receiving faxes in his or her E-mail Inbox. Internet faxes are generally of better quality than regular faxes, take less time to compose and send, and are an excellent way for business travelers to easily send faxes while on the road.

NOTE: Even though fax recipients cannot edit the text of a fax until they pass it through an optical character recognition [OCR, the process by which images of letters are entered into a computer with a scanner, then translated into characters users can work with] program, faxing remains a popular choice for sending documents because it ensures that recipients see a document it its true form. Sending documents as E-mail attachments is another good option, but it can present problems between incompatible programs. Thus, the document may not end up in its true format.)

If these capabilities entice you into exploring the world of Internet faxing, you will have to choose from a variety of services. Some are free, while others are advanced-featured services that charge per month and/or fax, usually with a setup fee. They all offer different feature sets, but the central focus of each is the same: they allow you to receive and send faxes.



  Receiving & Sending Faxes

Internet access and an E-mail address are all you need to receive Internet faxes. People call into your fax number (which you get when you sign up with a service), send the fax, and then your service processes it. Then, the service forwards the fax to your E-mail Inbox or places it online, where you use a browser to retrieve it. The fax is almost always in the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), which most Windows-based systems can read. If you can’t read a fax, however, your service should provide you with a special viewer.

Because sending faxes is a little trickier than receiving them, different faxing services use different methods. Some services let you send the fax to them as an E-mail message, with text and/or attachments. The service then reads the E-mail message and converts it to a fax. Other services have Web sites where you can compose the fax, secure attachments, and send it with the push of a button. Still others use a software system you download and install.

  Free vs. Commercial

Free is good . . . to a point. The following sites that offer free services do an exceptional job, but there are drawbacks. The phone number the service gives you will likely be a long distance call for anyone sending you a fax. Many services use advertising, although this isn’t a problem because most free systems involve receiving only).

The goal of these free services is to impress you so you’ll upgrade to the site’s premium (fee-based) services. With these premium services, you tend to get more options and advanced features, toll-free numbers (at an increased cost), better customer service, and access to additional services such as broadcast faxing (the ability to mass fax to thousands of people). Most premium or commercial services offer a base rate to fax per minute or page within the continental United States, with the rate rising depending on what country you’re faxing to.



  Commercial Services

Faxaway
http://www.faxaway.com
Prepay $10 by credit card (or $100 cash), and you’ll be up and running with Faxaway in no time. Another primarily by E-mail system (for Mac and Windows), Faxaway also allows PC users to download software to fax from Windows applications. After 15 free faxes, the service charges 11 cents per minute to fax to U.S. destinations (10 cents per minute on weekends). The service offers custom templates and broadcast faxing.

by Rich Gray