Review Internet faxing services

Looking for the right Internet faxing service? Here are some quick fact on the pricing and service features.

Standard Package: eFax Plus

• Setup fees: $10.00
• Monthly cost: $16.95
• 130 free received pages
• Send fax at $0.10/page

My Fax: Personal & Small Biz Faxing

• Monthly cost: $10.00
• 100 free sent pages
• 200 free received pages

CallWave Virtual Fax

• Monthly cost: $9.95
• 100 free sent pages
• 150 free received pages

Ring Central

• Monthly cost: $9.99
• 150 free sent pages
• 150 free received pages

What are the consideration points when selecting Internet faxing services?
Pricing, number of fax in and fax out, virtual fax storage capacity, fax storage period, toll free or local fax number, user friendliness, add on features like sms fax alert - these are some of the factors you might need to check out before subcribing the service. For further details on Internet faxing reviews, visit here.

*Updated*

As requested, here's another Internet faxing service that's worth a look - MetroFax. MetroFax needs a setup fees of $9.95 and their monthly cost is pretty high - $12.95. HOWEVER, this is not the full story. If you look deep enough, you'll notice MetroFax is on of the best bargains as they allow you to send or receive upto 1,000 pages with $12.95/mo!

MetroFax

• Monthly cost: $12.95
• 1000 free sent pages
• Or, 1000 free received pages

If you have ever owned a fax machine then you can understand how frustrating it is when it jams, cuts off page text, stops in the middle of a transmission, or the receiving machine is constantly busy or out of paper. Further more, extra cost of fax machine, the installation of a separate phone line to avoid conflicts with your answering machine, and the ongoing cost of replacement toner cartridges - all this piled up to be huge expenses that cannot be avoided.

Now imagine you can eliminate all these: no more paper jamming, smooth transmission, 24 hours stand by with no more engage tone, and most of all, minimum cost for maintaining the service. This is what an Internet faxing service can give.

Internet is the perfect way to send faxes because they don't have to be sent in "real time" as a phone call does. It's usually not a problem if it takes a few seconds longer to transmit so long as it gets there in a reasonably short time and it is error free.

Using Internet fax, you don't need to pay for the extra phone line, fax equipments and maintenance cost. All you need is to pay the subscribing fees to the faxing software and the cost per fax.

More over, do you know according to research, 17 million trees are chopped down annually just for the faxing paper in United States? Sending virtual faxes save more than just your money, the technology save more trees as well!

In most cases, all you need for starting up Internet faxing service is just an active email account. Some Internet faxing service providers (eFax and CallWave Virtual Fax for example) require you to pay a certain amount of setup fees; while some (MyFax for example) offer free setup. As soon as you are done with the registration, you are good to go in sending your first virtual fax.

For the ease of understanding, we will use My Fax to show how Internet faxes are sent and received. Note that MyFax requires no software installation for sending or receiving faxes. This is pretty different from the rest as many service providers will need to install a small piece of software into your system.



Sending Internet faxes

Open your email program (Outlook for example) and compose a new email.

In the recipient field, enter the destination fax number followed by the @myfax.com extension. The destination fax number must include the country code + area + local number without any spaces between the numbers.

In the "Subject" field, enter the information that you would like to appear in the fax header.

Within the body of the email, provide any text you want to have faxed. The body of the email will be appeared as the fax body. For MyFax services, any text in the email body will be converted to a fax image using 12-point fixed width font.

If you have more documents to be faxed, you can attach the files to the email. In general, document types like Words, PDF, as well as Excel files are supported by most virtual fax service providers.

For MyFax, you can attach up to 8 different documents to the email and send them out in a single email.

Receiving Internet faxes

After signing up for MyFax, you will be assigned a personal fax number. Your contacts send faxes to your fax number, just as they would normally do.
All faxes sent to your personal fax number arrive in your existing email account in the form of a PDF or TIFF attachment. Faxes can also be received online through a secure website.

For MyFax services, the first page of the fax will be previewed in the email body while the full text will be in the attachment.

The PDF or TIFF attachment will open in Adobe Acrobat Reader or any other image viewing software. You may read, print, resend (forward), or organize the fax just as any other softcopy in your computer.