How to send e-faxes

Faxing important documents can be a noisy, irritating process. It ties up your phone lines and doesn't copy images well. It can be expensive. Basically, it's just a pain. But there is a new kind of fax that takes all of that hassle away: e-faxes. But what is it? And how do you send e-faxes?

E-faxes use the internet to receive and send faxes. Traditional faxing involves sending a scanned copy of a document (a facsimile) from one fax machine to another, over the phone network. A fax machine is an electronic instrument composed of a scanner, a modem, and a printer. It transmits data in the form of pulses through a telephone line to a recipient, which is usually another fax machine, which then transforms these impulses into images, and prints them on paper.

Internet faxing (which is also known as `online faxing') is a general term which can refer to one of several methods of achieving this over the Internet - with a goal of both reduced costs and increased functionality over traditional faxing. Depending on the specific method of internet faxing, advantages of using the internet can include:

you don't need an extra telephone linehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_line for the fax machine
you have paperless communication with your associates, which can also be integrated with email
you're able to send and receive multiple faxes at the same time
your phone costs are reduced

The Internet has allowed the development of several other methods of sending and receiving a fax. The more common method is similar to computer-based faxing, and involves using a fax server (also known as a gateway) to the Internet to convert between faxes and emails. It is often referred to as "fax to mail" or "mail to fax". This technology is more and more replacing the traditional fax machine because it offers the advantage of getting rid of the machine as well as the additional telephone line. It follows this path: fax machine phone line fax gateway email message computer email account

This is how it works: an internet fax is sent via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) on the fax server which receives the fax and converts it into PDF or TIFF format, depending on the preference of the user. The fax is then sent to the web server which posts it in the Web interface on the account of the subscriber, who is then alerted to the reception by an email containing the fax in an attached file and sometimes by a message on his mobile phone. It follows this path: computer internet fax gateway phone line fax machine.

An Internet fax service allows you to send faxes from a computer via an Internet connection, thanks to a Web interface usually available on the supplier's web site. This technology has many advantages other than those listed above:

Mobility All the fax actions are done on the Web interface so the service is available from any computer connected to Internet
Confidentiality the faxes are received directly into the account of the user; you're the only one who can access it.
No installation of software or hardware All of your actions are done on the web, so there's no fancy software or hardware that you need to install
The faxes can be sent or received simultaneously, and faxes can be received while the computer is switched off.

So how do you send these faxes? Get on an online program such as efax.com and follow their simple instructions.

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