SEND AND RECEIVE FAXES VIA EMAIL
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 there are 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, there¹s an 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 that faxing overhead. There's no fax machine with
all of its disposable costs, no long distance telephone charges and
no second phone line.
MyFax assigns you a toll-free fax number you give out. 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 that toll free number 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 email program 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. A sender never gets an annoying busy
signal which can really frustrate someone trying to send you that
important fax. This works even if your computer is turned off. The
next time you access your email, you get the 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 beginning at $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.
www.myfax.com
| Craig Crossman is
a McClatchy-Tribune newspaper columnist writing about computers and
technology. He also hosts the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on
computers and technology, Computer America, heard on both the Business TalkRadio
Network® and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network®, weeknights at 10PM Eastern
time. Visit his website at http://www.computeramerica.com |
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