Send Fax through the Internet

When you send and receive fax over the Internet you gain all the computer fax benefits.

1. Flexibility - You can do your faxing anywhere that you have a computer and an Internet connection. You can easily arrange who gets a fax. You don't need to lug a fax machine anywhere and you don't need a box of paper with you.

2. Money savings - You save on a fax machine, dedicated phone line, paper, toner and paper storage.

3. Green Machine - You help the environment when you don't use paper unnecessarily and don't waste paper on junk faxes. You also don't have to deal with used toner cartridges. You use less energy by not having a machine and a dedicated phone line.

4. Reliability - Online fax is provided by companies with large data centers which use multiply redundant systems so that if any piece goes down another substitute immediately takes over. You don't depend on your local equipment. If your computer is down, your email will still be safe.

5. Time efficiency - No more waiting on fax lines. You can send multiple faxes simultaneously. You can also designate multiple receivers and receive multiple faxes simultaneously.

Sending a fax through most computer fax services is accomplished by sending an email. Some programs have special software to send the fax.

Most standard document, spreadsheet and PDF formats are supported. This is Efax's list of supported output formats

If you need to fax something that wasn't generated on a computer such as a freehand drawing or that brilliant idea that you had over lunch and scrawled on a napkin, you can scan it into your computer into a standard image file type such as bmp or jpg.

You can also send faxes of hand drawn items, paper documents or graphical images by using either the camera on your phone or your digital camera and downloading the image to your computer.

If you want to capture documents that you can't get the source for and you want to have the information translation from a picture to a usable office document, ScanR provides software for Blackberries and various phones that not only takes pictures but converts documents on the spot into text using OCR (optical character recognition) software.

You can also capture those documents that they won't let you take with you with your digital camera. If you don't need an instant conversion to an electronic document, digital camera images can be scanned at your convenience on your computer with OCR. Microsoft Office includes Microsoft Office Document Imaging which does this.