Send Fax From Email On Your Computer or Smartphone

Remember the fax machines of yore? Yes, the ones with the rolls of thermal paper. Those fax messages always had kind of a funny feel to them and the nasty habit of fading over time. So, the thing to do was take your incoming fax messages and copy them onto plain paper with a laser printer. Then go wash your hands to get rid of that icky feeling.

Fax has come a long way since its early roots. Thermal paper has gone the way of photostatic copies. Even the ubiquitous business fax machine is now an endangered species. What’s replacing it? Electronic transmission and storage in the cloud, of course.

The thing to do now is send and receive fax messages via email. At first glance, this seems like one step too many. Since email can send and receive messages just fine on its own, what do you need fax for?

Fax messaging is still a staple of many business processes. The term “fax” is short for “facsimile.” A facsimile means an exact copy of something. Think of fax machines as copiers that are hooked together over a telecommunications link. Whatever you load into one machine comes out as a copy on the other.

This is the value of fax messages. It’s a way of sending copies of business documents with original signatures and hand written notations across long distances. Fax was originally implemented as a replacement for messenger services and overnight mail. An exact copy of the original document has more business value than a message about what is in the document.

Many businesses still have and will keep their stand-alone fax machines. Home office users and smaller operations may use an “all-in-one” printer that doubles as a copier and fax machine. What about when you are away from the office? You can’t haul that beast in the back seat of the car, can you? The traditional workaround has been to visit an office supply store or other business that offers fax service to send or receive a message. Now you can skip all that and use your smartphone or laptop computer.

Yes, it is possible to cram a fax machine into your iPhone or Android smartphone. Well, in the form of an app, anyway. How does it do the scanning? With your phone’s camera. You simply take pictures of your document pages and then send them to the fax number of your choice. You can create a cover sheet right on the phone if you need one. At the other end, the document copy comes rolling out of the office fax machine with no one the wiser that you’ve done it all on your smartphone.

You can also receive fax messages on your smartphone. In fact, with any computer and a broadband connection you can both send and receive faxes from the office, the coffee shop or wherever you happen to be. You send faxes as email attachments. You also receive faxes as email attachments. The person or company sending you the fax dials a local or toll free phone number that is just for your faxes. Their machine sends out the fax message and you receive it as an email attachment.

Would you like the freedom and versatility of doing your business faxing via the Internet? If so, then you’ll be interested in a free 30 day trial of paperless faxing by email. The software you’ll need for your computers is free to download. Be sure to also get the smartphone app for the ultimate in mobile faxing.

Try Internet Fax For Free

In these days of hyperactive texting, fax machines may seem a bit quaint to the uninitiated. But fax messages are a staple of business and used to exchange contracts and other important business documents. So, does that mean you need to buy an armada of dedicated fax machines and run to the office when you need to send or receive a fax message? No way. You can do it all online from wherever you happen to be. That is, if you have the right fax plan.

What’s better than a fax machine in this business environment is a fax service plan. A fax machine is a one task dedicated piece of equipment that sits in a designated space, tethered to its own phone line. A fax service plan lets you receive and send faxes by email and online account. It works on your desktop PC. It works on your laptop computer.

Oh, I know. You remember those early fax software programs that ran on your computer. You needed a special fax modem and they tied up both your computer and your phone line. This service is nothing like that. You don’t need a fax modem or even a phone line. This is an Internet-based fax service that you access over your broadband Internet connection like other online applications.

Here’s what you get when you sign up for a RingCentral Internet Fax Service Plan or take the free trial offer. You get your own toll free or local phone number. What’s that for? It is so people can send fax messages to you. Remember that fax machines send and receive messages over telephone lines. RingCentral gives you a virtual fax machine, but it still needs a number for those other fax machines to call. Those incoming messages will be stored in your online account and sent to you via email. You can even get text messages on your cell phone or PDA alerting you to new faxes so you never miss an important message.

How about sending faxes? You can send a fax right from email. Your email message becomes the cover sheet. The attached documents become the fax pages. That’s the simple way to fax. You also get a free software application that adds a fax button to your Microsoft Windows applications, such as Outlook and Word. Click the button and you can send your document out as a fax message. You can electronically sign faxes using a bitmap of your signature. No need to print documents, sign them with a pen, and then scan them back in as you would with a standard fax machine.

The RingCentral Internet Fax is as powerful as a large dedicated fax machine. You can create groups of contacts and easily send faxes to the whole group from your computer. You don’t tie up any phone lines. You’ll be notified by the system when your faxes have been sent. Both the software app and online account let you create custom cover sheets. Over a dozen different page styles are included with the service. If you are having a problem with junk faxes, you can block those so they won’t come in.

By the way, your computer doesn’t even have to be on for you to get a fax message. The sender never gets a busy signal when someone is on the phone, either. Remember, this is a virtual fax machine that is hosted online.

How much does it cost for all this faxing goodness? Plans start as low as $7.99 a month for 300 pages with a small charge per page over that. If you regularly deal with high fax volumes, other plans will push that up to include 2,500 pages per month. That includes your toll free or local fax number. You can pay that much just for a toll free number from other suppliers.