Sending Faxes Online

The traditional fax machine is still a regular feature in literally all offices globally, but a growing number of businesses are now sending faxes online. There now exists many services which makes use of the internet to send faxes for pennies. Some of these sending faxes online services are free while others require a monthly or annual subscription. For some services, all that is needed is web access, while others may require installation of right fax software on your personal computer (PC).

Sending faxes online has changed the faxing landscape substantially. In the old days, one can only send a fax from one fax machine to another fax machine. Then special fax boards, software, and modems came into the picture, which allows users to fax their documents directly from their computers to a fax machine on the receiving end. But with the advent of the internet, sending faxes online became the in-thing where pages of faxed documents can be retrieved by the recipients either as a normal faxed document or as an email. This literally transforms the PC into a sort of internet fax machine.

Some commercial  services even take faxing on line to a higher level by providing bulk faxing (sometimes called blast faxing )- meaning the ability to fax the same number of documents to multiple people or recipients within a single transmission. This often takes away the need to purchase high volume fax machines.

Those who only fax occasionally can take advantage of free web faxing. These providers could survive because they are supported by advertisements.  The normal steps involved to send free internet fax are (a) key in the fax number, (b) type in the fax message, followed by (c) clicking the Submit button.

The commercial services market is quite competitive and they offer a wide range of features and packages. Most of the differences in these packages involves a limit on outgoing and incoming fax pages, the file formats in which faxes can be received and sent, and how many email accounts to which the faxes could be routed to, and personalised cover notes. Other differences concerns the provision of local phone numbers or toll-free numbers for receiving faxes, set-up fees, and whether the fax can be sent via the web. For occasional faxing, some service providers also offer prepared credit accounts which normally do not incur monthly fees and faxes are charged at a special service rate. This keeps costs down. A few service providers even offer free trial for prospective customers.

As competition hots up in the on line fax service arena, more offers tend to be thrown in as well. Some try to out do others by offering fax plus voicemail as e-mail attachments at no extra charge, with or without the need to install voicemail fax software, and blocking of junk faxes functionality. Competition has also "forced" providers to regularly improve reliability and security issues to keep customer satisfaction high. For busy executives who travels a lot, sending faxes online is a boon because they can now receive their faxes by viewing their emails in privacy, unlike the traditional forms which risks being seen by prying eyes.

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