I recently bought a new fax machine for my home office. I also maintain a separate phone number as my fax line. While the phone line needs to only be a basic service line, there's still the monthly line charge along with long distance charges for all of my out of area outgoing faxes. Plus there's the cost of disposables like special inkjet paper and the ink cartridges that always seem to run out of ink at the most inconvenient time. Add everything up and I discover that I'm paying some hefty dollars for the luxury of maintaining a fax machine. And then there are some other annoyances such as the physical machine itself. It takes up valuable space in my home office. It's plugged in which means there's another power cord I have to deal with. When a fax arrives, it's another annoying phone ringing sound, and the noise it makes printing out the fax is disconcerting since mine is on a shelf only about a foot away from my left ear. There has to be a better way of faxing in this day and age and of course, there really is.

MyFax is an Internet fax service that lets you send and receive faxes via your Internet connection but it lets you do it in much the same way as you would send and receive email. You can set up a MyFax account in a few minutes at their website and once it's set up, you can immediately begin to fax. First of all, MyFax is comparatively inexpensive to an ordinary fax machine. For starters, you really don't have any of the faxing overhead I just mentioned. There's no fax machine with all of its disposable costs, no long distance telephone charges and no second phone line. To begin, MyFax assigns you a toll-free MyFax Internet fax number which you can give out to everyone. What makes this even better than a fax machine is that your clients never pay long distance charges to fax you. In this competitive business world, free faxing to you gives you an edge right out of the gate. Plus the toll free number that you get costs you nothing.

If you work in a public location, MyFax gives you a whole lot of extra security since your faxes don't sit in the fax machine's receiving tray where anyone can see it. Plus you don't have to get up to get your faxes anymore. They come straight to your email inbox for you to read, save and print out. You decide what makes it to paper, what gets deleted and what gets saved for later reference.

To send a fax using MyFax, you simply use your normal email application but in the "To:" field, you put in the fax machine's area and telephone number and add on the "@myfax.com" suffix. From there, it's pretty much like sending any other email. You fill in the subject field, add an attachment or type in the text and click send.

But instead of being emailed, the subject, text and attachment are first sent to the MyFax servers where it is then sent over the phone lines to the receiving fax machine number you placed in the sending field. That's it and it's just that simple.

With MyFax, your faxes aren't subject to the many technical glitches that can occur using a regular fax machine. Your virtual fax machine is always on for one thing. Even if your computer's off, the next time you access your email, you get the fax. And the sender never gets that annoying busy signal which can really frustrate someone trying to send you that important fax. Typically, a sending or receiving fax machine will tie up the line for several minutes. With MyFax, your fax machine is always ready to send and receive.

Compared to a fax machine setup that can cost you hundreds, MyFax is really inexpensive costing exactly $10 a month. And since your faxes are always accessible from anywhere you have Internet access, it's like having a fax machine wherever you go. And that's the fax.