What’s Currently The Best Way to Send and Receive Faxes?

2020 has brought plenty of challenges for people around the World, and in the meantime it has transformed the way we do business and communicate with each other.  Although digital means of communications are so advanced that you can reach a person in Asia in just a few milliseconds, there are people who prefer traditional technologies, one of them is faxing.

Fax technology was developed as a solution to the problem of sharing documents between businesses and offices.  It replaced the office courier with a single machine capable of reproducing documents remotely.  Back when was the fax machine invented, it had a major impact in businesses and in many ways paved the way for digital communications.

Nowadays fax is still used by millions of offices around the World because it’s the best way to send and receive documents safely, ensuring it has arrived at the correct destination.  An email can be opened by everyone, but faxes are sent and confirmed at the moment by the person on the receiving end. This is the reason why faxed documents are legally binding and used in industries such as law or healthcare, where client’s privacy is of utmost importance and protected by regulations.

There are a few ways you can fax these days, let’s take a look at them.

Keep Using a Fax Machine

That’s right, you can still use a fax machine to this day.  There are a couple of things you need besides the machine itself though: a phone line and printing supplies.   If you’ve never used a machine before there are some pretty useful tutorials in Youtube that can be of great help.

If you work at home or sharing your phone line, you’ll need a dedicated fax line, which is nothing but a common phone line but used exclusively for faxing.  This will avoid troublesome interruptions whenever someone picks up the phone to make a call or by accident. An alternative to buying a fax machine is getting a multifunctional printer with faxing capabilities.

Use an Online Fax Service

This is the fastest way to fax right now.  Instead of connecting your computer to a fax machine, you turn it into a virtual one.  For this you’ll need the help of an online fax provider which lets you use their fax server technology to convert multiple types of files into fax images, which are compatible with old fax machines as well.

In addition, online faxing services give you a virtual fax number. This number remains active all day at all times and is exclusively used for fax transmissions, so it acts as a dedicated fax line.  You can pick between local or toll-free numbers when creating your account.

Sending a fax is as easy as sending an email, according to GoogleOnlineFax.com you can fax using any free email provider such as Gmail in just a few steps.

A pretty cool feature of the top rated online fax providers in the market is that they have corresponding fax apps.  They make it a breeze to fax on the go, turning your phone into a fax machine that fits in your pocket.  Fax apps can help you send, receive faxes and also sign them with your own digitized signature.

Fax services are paid, they cost on average $12 a month, but there are different companies and plans to choose from.  Some of them even let you create a free account for a month.

Websites To Fax Online

You may have found while searching online, the existence of websites which let you fax online through a web form.  These free-to-fax sites usually let you send a couple of pages free per day to a limited amount of destinations.

While the idea sounds good, we recommend that these services should only be used for non-important documents.  The main reason is security, not all of these sites provide what you expect in terms of encryption, another reason is that they usually deliver a cover page with ads preceding your message.  This not only wastes more paper in offices that still rely on the use of traditional fax technology, but also look very unprofessional.

These pages only serve for sending faxes, they don’t give you a number or a virtual fax line that you can use to receive faxes, and only work with three or four different file types.  So for example if you have an XLS file you’ll need to first convert it to PDF or BMP.