Different ways to send an internet fax

If your fax machine is malfunctioning, you don’t actually own one or your phone line is having problems and you need to fax, then you can send an internet fax instead. You don’t have to panic and rush out to an office supply and service store to send a single-page fax. As long as you have a working, up-to-date computer and an internet connection, you can send an internet fax.

One important thing to remember is that your document has to be in a digital file format, preferable PDF or TIFF. These two are the most widely accepted internet fax formats, depending on the service provider, you can use.

Where do I do this?
Searching the web for free fax and online fax websites will yield a long list of service providers. Some will let you send an internet fax for free, while others will ask you to pay a premium for their services. It’s up to you to decide if just sending a single fax is enough or you want a permanent internet fax service to use in your home or office.

What are my options?
Trying out an online fax service is usually free. Some websites let you send one or two faxes per day directly from a GUI on their website. The GUI looks a lot like any email application with a field for a fax number instead of an email address. You might be asked to provide your own fax number (if just for reference) or email address.

You can then either upload your document like an email attachment or type your fax in a text box provided when you send an internet fax. Take note of the file formats, file size restriction and number of files the website lets you upload.

Free fax websites usually let you send one or two faxes per day and never let you receive faxes or notify you if your fax has been received properly. If you choose to subscribe to a paid fax service, however, you will undoubtedly be able to do more than send one or two faxes in a day.

An important feature of premium fax services is that you will be given a fax number as if you had a phone line dedicated to a fax machine. Contacts can send you faxes through this number and even call you, depending on the features you subscribed to. You can then receive and send faxes more efficiently than with a conventional fax machine. The service provider will also notify you if your fax was received successfully on your PC or mobile phone.

Since you don’t rely on the physical capabilities of a fax machine, you can also send and receive multiple faxes simultaneously. You don’t have to feed the document into the machine for each recipient nor will anyone who wants to fax you ever get a busy tone.

Next time you’re in a bind with your fax machine or don’t have one, why don’t you try to send an internet fax?

Send an internet fax using the right medium

One of the basic things to consider when you’re looking to send an internet fax is the medium or channel you want your fax message to pass through. Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined a famous phrase, “the medium is the message,” to highlight how the form of a medium embeds itself into a message. Most people would argue that the message is always more important than the medium, but in the context of electronic faxing, the medium is as indispensable as the message and can inevitably make or break your enterprise.

The Means
Obviously, you can’t send an internet fax if you don’t have the means. The first thing you have to do is to choose the right internet fax service for you. If you look around, there are hundreds of fax providers online that offer most of the basic things you’ll need in a fax service. Plus, most of them have their features detailed on fine print so you can’t miss out on anything. Another option is to ask your virtual phone service provider if they offer faxing services (they most likely do). If you’re still not at ease, you can always ask around. Read reviews, and pit different fax services against each other, using their capabilities and limitations to make a pros and cons list.

The Method
Once you’re subscribed to the fax service of your choice, you’re almost ready to send an internet fax. But before that, you need to consider the limitations of your recipient. You have to make sure it reaches them, and that it reaches them correctly. Most fax services provide you with the ability to send fax depending on who you're sending your messages to, for instance:

1. You can send an internet fax to a recipient who relies on a traditional fax machine. This option is ideal if you’re dealing with clients or suppliers who still use the old-fashioned way of sending and receiving fax messages. They will be able to receive your messages in their conventional fax machines even if you don’t send them through the same equipment as theirs.
2. You can send an internet fax to a recipient who uses a dedicated fax number similar to yours. Like you, some business people employ paperless faxing in their respective workflows and have retired their bulky fax machines entirely. Transmitting faxes over the internet to someone who will receive them in the same fashion makes transactions easier and hassle-free.

The Manner
The importance of the medium over the message extends beyond choosing which channel through which you send an internet fax. Usable messages must also be clear, timely, and appropriate for the intended recipient. On the surface, it may seem that the medium greatly influences and shapes how messages are sent and received, but form is just as important to relay the message properly. As a small business owner who needs to send an internet fax, it is your duty to embrace the medium and the form upon which your message takes shape in order to communicate with your clients better.

Why send an Internet fax when you can just email?

Confused as to why you need to send an Internet fax when you can just send your usual email? Here’s a comparison of Internet fax and Email.

Internet Fax and Email Dissimilarities

All points stated, it may seem much better to transmit an e-mail than send an Internet fax. Nonetheless, there are some advantages to Internet fax when we think about other elements.

• Faxes give correspondences a a lot more expert air than e-mail. Some service providers also contain pre-set cover letter templates which are customizable.
• An email account could be easily misused, and you have spam messages from your “friends” as evidence for that. Internet fax providers, however, give you the option to make use of your secure online fax account to send an Internet fax.
• Emails are easy to mess with. They can be changed or edited at whim. Faxes are not easily changed, and it would take considerable skill to do so.
• Anything sent by means of the internet is not 100% secure. But you can choose to send an Internet fax through a service provider that automatically encrypts all your faxes.
• Email is fundamentally unsecure. An administrator can easily read email sent through the server. While an uncommon practice, networks can also be sniffed and emails read. For those who feel that there’s a risk for their sensitive emails to be intercepted, you could use an encryption scheme for e-mail. Nonetheless, this could possibly be cumbersome for both sender and receiver. Very good e-mail encryption tools are also usually not free.

Similarities of Internet Fax and Email

Email and Internet fax have common features and functions that may make them much more efficient and convenient than using snail mail or conventional fax.

• Email is cost-free, and it is possible to also send an Internet fax for free by way of some service providers. Nonetheless, it could be ideal to subscribe to paid Internet fax service in case you need to have much more to make use of the service regularly and need a lot more advanced features.
• You can attach an electronic signature to each email and fax messages. The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act recognizes the validity of electronic signatures in 47 US States. Also, business, commercial and governmental transactions via electronic means are given legal effect and enforceability provided that the details is obtainable to both parties and also the signatures may be linked or logically related to the record.
• In business, you can use both for marketing products. Provided that your content is intriguing enough, email marketing can be an efficient form of promoting products and services. Whereas, you are able to send an Internet fax to all those you have an Established Business Relationship (EBR) with or to those that have openly published their number online or in an open directory.
• You can send several email messages, the same as sending a fax broadcast
• You can send an Internet fax and an e-mail via handy Internet-connected devices like notebooks and smartphones
• Messages could be sent easily and conveniently to recipients through the internet

Internet fax and e-mail may have similarities, however, when we think about professional-looking and security documents, it’s still much better to send an Internet fax.

Save Cash, Send An Internet Fax

The manner in which individuals do things has been changed by the internet. Mechanical tasks such as making phone calls, printing, photocopying, and faxing are now executed using the newest technology. Most people have appreciated the concept of placing phone calls through the use of cloud PBX technologies. But the capability to send an Internet fax to any location anytime and anyplace, without actually having the need for a fax machine, might be new to many people. Why send an internet fax if you can send fax in the traditional way? To answer this question, here is a short run-through of the business advantages of web faxing.

Save Money Using New Technology

The employment of traditional equipment has been replaced significantly by newer, more valuable and efficient technologies. One example of such new technology is Internet fax. Online faxing pertains to the act of sending fax documents over the internet instead of using the traditional fax machine. Therefore, this technology makes it useless for your organization to purchase additional hardware and phone lines. Because there are no exorbitant fees when you send documents overseas, internet faxing also gives you fast savings in communication expenses. Because you are only paying for the service fee charged by your phone service provider, keeping costs down is simple with web fax. It totally eradicates expensive long distance rates.

New Technology for Advocacy

The green revolution is really the “in” thing among households and big offices alike. Most offices nowadays are offering the usage of paperless office communications. This is an environment-friendly move that helps improve your savings in terms of reducing paper use. With Internet fax, you no longer need to use plenty of paper.

Different Features

Send an Internet fax if you want several individuals to obtain your documents instantly. Just send out a single document and all the people in your recipient list gets a copy. This is dissimilar from using a traditional machine which needs you to send the same fax to various numbers separately. You save precious work time when you send an Internet fax. You can also send an Internet fax in more flexible file formats. Internet fax enables you to send attachments in different formats such as PDF, jpeg, and tiff formats, and you are able to even send black and white or colored faxes.

Each time you send an Internet fax, your business automatically rakes in savings. Replacing old and mechanical methods of performing office operations can be tedious and boring. However, with the aid of the internet technology, work can become faster and more efficient. If you want a better way of sending facsimiles, take advantage of e-fax.

Go paperless, Send An Internet Fax

These days, lots of individuals are more mindful of their share to the improvement of the environment’s worsening condition. Companies are working on their share to help as scientific symposia and conventions are held to discuss ways of averting the climate change and global warming. This is also why the cloud-PBX or VoIP phone system that permits users to send an internet fax is the “in thing” in recent times.

Why send an internet fax instead?

Basically, to send an internet fax isn't just something you do for environment-friendly reasons. Keep in mind, as much as you'd like to be an “environmental warrior” you also have a business to operate. So, more than becoming eco-conscious, to send an internet fax actually helps you and your company much better in more ways than one:

• Paperless fax messaging. Companies veer away from printed fax messages and move to the age of paperless fax messaging by sending an internet fax. To send an internet fax is to not only enjoy more comfort, it is also to be more cost-efficient. If your business relies heavily on fax messaging, envision the volume of money you can save in fax machine paper, maintenance and ink costs. If you have the funds to invest for a more inconvenient way to fax, why not use it on a more effective internet fax service? You can simply proceed and send them via your office or home PC instead of printing out those one-paragraph messages or simple order forms that required to be sent.
• Use various methods to send an internet fax. Back in the day, just to send your message across you’ll have to depend on phone lines as well as fax-dedicated machines. These days you are able to send an internet fax quite effectively from your Internet-connected PC, smartphone, or PDA. You can send an internet fax any time you want so long as you’re subscribed to an internet fax messaging service.
• Convenient subscription packages and functions. Normally, web fax is offered as a built-in feature of a full-blown cloud-PBX or VoIP phone system. Nevertheless, there are instances wherein stand-alone internet fax messaging is offered by cloud PBX service providers as a different product or service. Whatever the situation might be, based on your need to send an internet fax and the other convenient features built with it, you can still decide which subscription plan you may purchase.

Generally, you'd realize that it’s more than just becoming an eco-friendly company if you take into account how much your business can benefit from going paperless and choosing to send an internet fax instead. To send an internet fax is to do a more cost-efficient and handy method to go about your day-to-day transactions, thus making your business more than what you realized.

Internet Fax Isn’t Just Email Fax

“Why send an Internet fax?” It may appear like a silly question that you wouldn’t wish to ask loudly, but believe it or not, you are not the only one asking.

When you have a bevy of other alternatives such as secure file sharing sites and even common office emailing systems, why indeed should you use Internet fax? Isn’t faxing in general old-fashioned anyway, because of that physical fax machines are slowly becoming extinct? You use email to carry out your Internet faxing anyway, don’t you? So why not just remove the pretense of fax and just stick with e-mail?

Internet Fax Isn’t Just E-mail Fax

To start with, Internet fax is a a lot more complicated than just attaching your fax document to an e-mail. There are other ways to send an Internet fax, including utilizing the printer function on your document making program and logging on to an on-line interface. So you can’t exactly say that internet faxing is merely sending faxes via e-mail (even though that's the most common incarnation people use).

Given this, you can’t precisely say that Internet faxing and e-mail are basically similar nor can you say that email can totally replace faxing. At the moment, there are fundamental distinctions, such as the fact that…

You Can’t Email a Standard Email Attachment to People who Don’t Email

The fact of the matter is that not everyone has total reliance on email. Of course, virtually everybody has an email account now, particularly if they work in an office. Email is a generally desired means of communication today, but some people are still more comfortable getting fax messages instead of normal email attachments. Some older customers or coworkers might even select to not to check their e-mail and still depend on their fax machines (not to mention telephones) to obtain messages.

In this case, you link the gap between yourself and that individual by sending an online fax. When you send an Internet fax, you're using an interface that is convenient to you while creating an output that is more familiar to the other person on the line. It’s a win-win situation on both ends. And in line with this is…

You can Send a “Fax Blast” to Different Individuals with Various Choices

One of the great advantages of the mash-up among virtual communication and fax is the fact that you can now send a single fax document or message to a number of people at the same time. Since the document is carried in a way that can be received in both virtual and physical format, you can be convinced that that particular file may be received by as many individuals as possible. When you send an Internet fax blast, you're faxing more successfully than you ever did before.

So the next time you feel the need to ask (or hear someone asking) “Why send an Internet fax?” just remember that fax still has its place.

Showcase Your Business, Send An Internet Fax

You are doing more than just making the fax process simpler and affordable for you whenever you send an Internet fax instead of using a fax machine to communicate. What you are actually doing is building an opportunity to improve the way you do business.

If you take the time to consider what Internet fax can do for you, you'll soon see that you are given a lot of marketing options. Faxing via the internet can revolutionize your company’s consumer and client relations granted you know how you can use it to your company’s benefit. There are many ways to use a virtual fax service to make your business stand above the competition. These include:

Expressing Your Brand

Its potential for reliability in terms of branding is among the most significant merits of Internet fax. You have the choice to create a document based on a particular company template when you decide to send an Internet fax to a consumer or client. Because e-fax typically permits you to create a soft-copy fax document that only requires to be attached to your e-mail or uploaded onto a dedicated fax server, this is rather easy to do. Whenever you take the additional step of creating a consistent fax document format, you can present to recipients a really solid image of your company.

There are virtual fax service providers that provide users the ability to design their own fax cover pages for that little bit of extra professionalism and personality that can impress those that receive the faxes. Take advantage of it right away in case you will be utilizing a service that provides this. A great fax cover page does wonders for the imagined credibility and dependability of an organization.

Spreading the Word

The fact that you can send an Internet fax to a number of individuals at the same time is an additional factor that makes Internet fax a favorable option to conventional fax. Not only is this expedient or convenient. The ability to send out a single fax document to many recipients also provides you with a potentially effective rallying tool within your organization in addition to a great advertising tool outside it.

With online faxing, you are able to send official announcements and news to your workers and have them get these via e-mail or fax machine. And you can still try the service to send useful and fascinating white papers to customers who've agreed to subscribe to your community although there are limitations to the usage of fax for marketing purposes.

When you send an Internet fax to several individuals simultaneously, you are doing more than disseminating info. You're communicating with individuals who support your company. In a way, you can benefit from Internet fax to express your gratitude of their collaboration and encouragement.

How you take advantage of online fax is up to you. Just keep in mind that you're doing more than merely being convenient - you are reaching out to other people and promoting yourself to the world the next time you send an Internet fax.