Dayton, OH · Member since 2008 · 517 posts · 17 votes
Surely someone else has done this...
I don't have / want an actual fax machine... I want everything to be in an electronic format. Ideally I would be able to send Word files, or PDF files, and faxes that get sent to me would go to my email address. So far the best thing that I have found is this:
With all-in-one printers really coming down in price, that's what I use. Don't need a dedicated fax line, it just piggy backs off the regular telephone line. I don't have a regular home phone but I do use VOIP (Vonage) which I've been reasonably happy with. With the VOIP feature, voicemails and faxes can also be dropped to email. I imagine that I can set up the all-in-one to receive faxes as digital images only and not print out the paper...but then I'd have to pull out the owner's manual...and it's all the way across the desk...ah forget it.
Looks like k7 only allows you to store 20 messages. Presumably you can save the files elsewhere but I haven't used it.
Be careful about keeping everything digital and not backing up though; I heard two stories lately that made me shudder. A fellow entrepreneur couple were getting ready to pitch their latest business plan to investors and their laptop went crazy. They lost EVERYTHING and hadn't backed up so had to recreate in about a week's time. Rotten. And, my neighbor lost all of her gound-level dissertation work--nearly seven year's worth--when her laptop got stolen. Yikes! I have an external hard drive where I back up about once a month and I burn a group of critical folders to cd/DVD every few months and store them in my fire safe box. Scary.
I don't really need a fax machine yet... but wouldn't sending it on the internet kind of amount to the same thing as a email? just a more formal form of it?
People can actually use their phone-based fax to feed in the paperwork, dial another phone number (your virtual web fax) and send you the info. It's the same as if they used a scanner instead and then emailed you the file. But, people still have faxes, for whatever reason, even though we've got scanners. So the big difference is that they're sending it from a phone-based fax instead of a computer-based email.
Good tips Jeff. I am usually good about keeping things backed up properly. If I can get faxes to come in to my email inbox then my faxes get backed up whenever I save my email messages (I keep them on the mail server as well as my client program).
VOIP might be a good way to go with this. So how does it work with your all-in-one machine? Do you have to know that someone is trying to send a fax? Is it a problem if you have voicemail?
My all-in-one plugs into the VOIP router and so does my home phone. You can set it up so that you need to "accept" each fax as it comes in, or you can set the fax to auto-answer and it picks up after x-many rings. I have had some periodic problems with people calling and getting the fax...I ended up getting a separate fax line for it, which costs a few bucks. Now that I think about it, I might be stupid. I'll take another look at the k7 product, which is free. Not sure if k7 lets you take a digital image and fax it out to a phone-fax, though. That would be helpful too. hmmm.... :crazed:
efax looks promising. I tried to select an area code for a fax line, but I don't see my area code listed though I guess it's not a huge deal, I can always pretend that I live in a different area code. Perhaps I should pretend I live in Beverly Hills :lol:
EDIT: Apparently with the free service you get a fax number, albeit it is not in any area code of your choice. Would someone like to test it? The fax number is (201) 596-1491. Let's see how much spam I get! :lol:
I've been using this for over a year now, and it's great. It's a combination voicemail/fax service. You can set up your calls to go direct to VM, or forward it to any phone # you'd like (cell, office, home). It's the only phone # on my business card. You can also listen to your voicemails online. As for the faxes, you can print them right from the website, forward them to an email address, or forward them to another fax number. Works great for me.
People can actually use their phone-based fax to feed in the paperwork, dial another phone number (your virtual web fax) and send you the info. It's the same as if they used a scanner instead and then emailed you the file. But, people still have faxes, for whatever reason, even though we've got scanners. So the big difference is that they're sending it from a phone-based fax instead of a computer-based email.
wow, I din't know there was that big of a difference. Thank you for telling me.
We use the following service:
http://www.myfax.com/
This eliminated the need for fax lines and drastically reduced clutter and extra paper. Everything comes to one computer and can be distributed from there and stored digitally.
It also gives us the added benefit of having a toll-free fax number so that our customers around the country do not have to incur any costs in faxing to us. In addition, we can also fax out to anywhere toll-free as well - so we elimanted long distance charges.
We still have a fax machine, but we rarely ever have to use it now.
I use MaxEmail. By far the best internet fax service I've found. $24 per year gets you 500 inbound pages a month and outbound pages are $.10/minute and no set up fee. Faxes come through real clear (as far as faxes go anyway) and I've never had a problem with down time. I tried Efax and MyFax, but they ended up being to pricely and in the case of Myfax, unrealiable.
I use TrustFax (http://www.trustfax.com/ ) and have found that it's a great deal for someone who needs a constant fax number, but doesn't send a huge volume of faxes. It's only $19.95 per year, for 70 incoming or outgoing pages, and a toll-free number. Additional faxes are $.10 per page.
Thanks for the suggestions! This has been quite a hot topic and I'm glad to have gotten so much feedback on which services work well and which ones don't.
Looking over the options I think that MaxEmail looks like a good choice for me so I'll have to look at it more closely.
I reckon I am confused. I tried to get cherry tree software to make me a fax modem in a day before I even owned a computer so that I could buy one and have the best of both worlds. He tried to explain the jargon of it all and it was greek but fax at the time spoke ascii text I think and Computers xt(s) text. Any ways I did not buy a computer for years after and I am sorry for it. Now all of them come with a standard fax modem and you can send or recieve fax from your computer and had I known it at the time I would have had the thing invented and be billionaire now but so would I when I thought of canning water for pop machines when I had my first drink of city water and felt so bad for them poor folks that never had country mountain spring. Seems I missed a few billion there again. Guess I wish I had as greater ideas as I did with I was 12 and 20 .
Fax over computer is something everone can do and yet I do not. You can do it with complex software programs or simple free ones and I think XP and later additions of windows has this all built in.
Now surely I have missed something about your inquiry or everone would have already told you this. Regardless you can send and recieve any documents you desire from the fax builtin to every modem I have seen in the past 15 years. Next problem is that if you do not have a fax modem then chances are you may not find one as they are becomming obsolete.
In fact I just verified that win 2k also has this feature in it and I believe windows 98 did as well but you had to buy software for 98 and I used to have one called e-communicate and a simple one called winfax I think that was free.
I've used k7 for years now and have never had a problem. The faxes can come by email, so that way I have them saved by date for future use in case I lose the printout.
Quite frankly, I've used paid computer fax services before and k7, which is free, has proven to be more reliable for me.
Deborah, can you tell me more about this K& thing? I used to run some freeware and some 100-1000+ dollar programs but never was happy with any of them. I hate having a phone cable pluged in to my computer due to lightening strikes as I had one that went right through a UPS backup and surge protector once and have been leary every since. The APC company stood behind thier warranty and replaced the system as agreed due to product failure but I would love to know about the email fax or K& program...
I sure understand about lightening strikes! That's a whole other story in and of itself....To keep it short, I had lightening hit my house when I was on the phone and it melted the phone, my computer's wiring, and some wiring in other applicances. If I had not been wearing tennis shoes, I doubt I'd be here today. The experience of being enveloped in lightening is a whole other topic!
Anyway, you can sign up for free for k7 at www.k7.net. If your computer gets fried from lightening, you can always access k7.net's online storage center using someone else's computer.
The messages are saved on k7.net's website for a limited time and there are some other restrictions, such as you need to receive a certain amount of faxes per month for your free service to continue. In the member area, you can have your faxes sent to your email (they come in an image file that's attached to your email). Although they've been sent by email, the faxes are also stored on k7.net. There's also a voice mail option, which is nice if you're traveling and want to access your voice mail over the Internet.
My email fax messages always come from K7.net, so I've set up my Outlook to sort any messages from k7 into a "fax" folder.
I've been using this service for over 5 years. One of the things I love about it is that I tend to get buried alive with paperwork and will misplace a printed fax or other document. Since these faxes come by email, I save all of my "fax email' except the spam. I can reprint the fax if I've lost it, which has been great. Also, if I am traveling on business and need to retrieve a fax, I can just log in to k7 and pull the document.
When you get faxes by email, you can also convert the fax image into an Adobe Acrobat file if you have the Adobe software. I've used this for distribution of legal documents...
Thank you so very much. I too hate hard copy Faxes. It does not appear you can send from K7 but this is certainly still a blessing for sure. I have placed it in my start up so I will be reminded daily till I have time to set it up maybe Friday. I see they have vanity fax numbers as well. I am not sure if they offer a paid premium service or not yet but seems the free one is all you could need.
The image doc you receive,,,, Is it Text based screen shot that Acrobat can reconize or some OCR program ?
Sorry to bother you about all this but I have the full version of Acreobat and distiller and all and can convert these if you can I am sure.
I use a system called myfax which is relatively inexpensive,and you have the option of an 800 fax number at no extra cost. There is also nothing to download, extremely user friendly so far.