I hate fax machines. They are always running out of paper or toner when you
need them. Then there are the paper jams. And, of course, if you are
traveling, it's virtually impossible to retrieve your faxes remotely.
Typically, somebody has to refax the fax, and that's just plain ugly. That's
why I love eFax.
When I started putting together my home office, folks started asking me for
my fax number. Fax? Why fax when you can email? Don't know, but a large
portion of the world still likes to watch fax machines scan their paper. Seems
like an utterly useless product to me.
So I started shopping for a fax machine. While prices have gone down, the
number of features have gone up. I already owned a phone with an integrated digital
voice message recorder, so I didn't need all those new fangled, fancy
features. I just wanted to receive and send faxes from my home office. Call me
cheap, but I did not want to spend a few hundred on a decent fax machine.
I looked at eFax and it had everything I wanted and more. First, it an
option to offer people my own, personal toll-free 800 fax number. I liked
that. A LOT. Made me look bigger and better than I was. I also liked the fact
that it was transparent to the public. They did not have to do anything
special -- just dial my 800 number and fax away.
It's also damned fast. Internet traffic aside, faxes typically make it
through instantly or, at the very least, in a few minutes. I have a cable
modem in my home office, so speed is definitely not an issue.
eFax supplies you with a little piece of software you install on your PC.
When a fax arrives in your email, you simply click on the attached file, and
the eFax reader pops up and shows you a scanned fax message exactly as it would
look printed off a real fax machine. You can archive the scanned image or
print it. You can even annotate it and refax it -- all without a real fax
machine.
The cost? About $20.00/month. Sure, I could have spent about $200.00 on a
new fax machine, but then I would have had to deal with the paper and ink
supplies, the paper jams, the service and maintenance and the poor refaxes.
Why? With eFax, now I can retrieve my faxes even remotely through email. God
bless America. You gotta love this service. Click the banner for more info.
eFax
