How Can I Make an Online Fax?

Online faxes can save you from having to buy even more equipment for your home office and are easy and simple to set up, and some websites also offer free online faxes to save you even more money.

You will need to have Internet access to use the online fax services, and if you need to send off a printed document you will need to also have access to a scanner, so that you can scan the document into your PC ready to fax.  If you do not have a scanner there are a few services that allow you to use your digital camera to take an image of your document, which will then be turned  into a compatible file (such as PDF) ready for faxing.

Online faxing is very similar to sending an email, and you will simply log on to the fax service provider, attached the document and then input the fax number you wish to send to and the fax provider will then send the fax electronically.  You will also be given your own fax account number, and will be able to receive faxes from both online accounts and standard fax machines, and any replies will appear in your account inbox (like an email inbox).  Some services also let you access your online fax account from personnel mobile devices that are connected to the Internet such as multimedia phones and PDAs, and this can be handy if you travel a lot out of the office on business.

Service rates for online faxing do vary, so make sure you shop around and look carefully at any limits placed on the account, such as how many faxes you can send and receive per day, and how many pages you can send at once.  Free accounts will often limit the number of faxes per day to just 2-3, which should be fine for smaller businesses, but may not be practical if you need to do any bulk faxing.  Also free fax accounts will limit the amount of pages you can send at once, so if you need to fax off long documents this will not be much use to you.