Elaine

We all knew workplace and workforce nowadays require more and more mobile-power, Email fax (or some call it Internet faxing) services had turned into a popular communication tools in all sort of business. Nevertheless, the technology is still relative new to the public. We hope via this article, we can give a brief idea to those inexperienced about how Email fax can ease your worklife or business.

What is Email fax or Internet faxing?

In brief, Internet faxing is a service that provides you the ability to send faxes without the fax machine. Instead, faxes are sent or received over Internet in Email attachment format. These Email faxes can be either read in softcopy (.pdf or image format) or printed out by the receivers fax machine.

Why use Email faxing? The benefits of Email fax

By using Email fax services, faxes are sent and received instantly online in a cheaper price when compare to traditional faxing machine.

If you have ever used a conventional faxing machine before, you should be able to know how tiring can it be when a fax machine starts to dysfunction. Paper jam, incomplete fax transmission, fax machine constantly with busy tone, miss fax when out of paper, and cuts off page text are the common scenario you will be facing. Further more, it is not cheap to get a fax machine running. Besides startup cost in buying the fax machine and installing the extra phone lines, you still need to pay extra monthly cost for the fax lines, paper cost, as well as ongoing maintenance cost such as cost of toner cartridges replacement.

What if you can eliminate all these troubles? No more paper jam, no more incomplete fax transmission, no more busy tone, no more miss fax when out of paper, and no more cuts off page text! This is what you can get with Internet faxing; and this is why, Internet faxing is such popular.

As the Internet faxes are sent via Emails, all you need is a PC with Internet connection, which is a must for any business nowadays, and minimum subscription fees on the faxing services. Also by using Internet fax services, you skip the paying for extra phone line, faxing equipments, and also the sky-high fax machine maintenance fees.

How does Email fax works?

It is easy to use Internet fax services. When sending Internet faxes, users will use a web interface given by the service provider or email program like Outlook. The work flow of sending out Internet fax is very similar to sending email. Users will need to key in the fax number instead of email address in the To text bar.

Receiving Internet faxes is easy; you do not need to be familiar with faxing software, nor fax machine neither to use the Internet faxing interface. Normally, the email faxing services will install a small application (toolbar or window box) into your PC as a plug-in inside the email program. Upon receipt, an automated program converts the email to a fax format, then faxes to the number supplied in the fax-header. The recipient receives the fax normally, through fax machine.

Choices in Email faxing services

Seeing Internet fax as an effective answer to the old fax machine, several vendors have produced and are selling Internet faxing services nowadays. There are companies that offer software only solutions that allow you to fax directly from your computer to any fax machine; and there are services offer fax-to-IP Internet gateway products, which are hardware-based routers that emulate a fax machines.

Faxing services that use software (for example eFax or CallWave fax) require that you sign up with fax service provider. For eFax Internet faxing services, the monthly service charge is from $0-$19.95 depend on which package you go for; while limiting their users to only receive fax, CallWave fax charge their users less than 10 bucks per monthly.

The advantages of using this method are that faxing becomes considerably cheaper because you are not making long distance connections over the phone lines, no hardware is required, you get faster transmission, you can send many faxes at once, no dedicated fax lines are needed, and a web interface is available if you wish to add fax-on-demand capability to a website.

Another type of Internet faxing is known as fax-to-IP. Fax-to-IP Internet gateway products needs hardware-based routers that emulate a fax machines. With these, faxing is done in the regular way using the fax machine, but the gateway device, which then dials the destination fax machine and sends the fax, interrupts the process.

The fax-to-IP service is good if you don't send a lot of faxes, but would still like to take advantage of the savings of using Internet delivery. It is also good if you do a lot of international fax calls. The disadvantages are that you won't save much on either domestic faxing, or faxing to countries where the Internet infrastructure is less well developed.

Conclusion

As you already can see from the details above, Internet faxing services are one of the online services that can beneficial greatly to your business or personal expenses.

However in order to get the best from it, one must be careful and review more on the faxing services thats available in the market. Different Internet faxing packages are meant for different categories of users.

In case that receiving fax is only what you needed, you can try out eFax Free which will cost you nothing; if you send faxes frequently and needs a toll-free number for your business, eFax Plus might be something you want to look at. If you are always on the road and need to send email faxes via mobile portal, Call Wave faxing services is recommended.

Teddy strongly recommend business owner to send fax thru Email as the service will save up the faxing cost greatly.