Online Faxes and Virtual Fax Numbers

Online fax services allow you to send faxes over the internet, and they may also allow to receive faxes online by using a virtual fax number. This number may be local or toll free, depending on where you live and what numbers are available. Some fax services charge an added fee for these number, but others may include them as part of a package for a monthly membership fee. Some providers may also charge a setup fee for the number, but this is not always the case. Discounted rates on multiple numbers may be available, and this can be very convenient for businesses. Each of the virtual fax numbers can be routed to a different email address for a different employee. These numbers usually work by allowing faxes to be sent to the virtual number, which then converts them to a computer-friendly format like PDF or TIFF, then delivers them to the recipient’s inbox as an email attachment. These can be viewed online or on many mobile devices.

These services are very convenient for many people because they allow you to send faxes without the need of a fax machine. Faxes can be sent from anywhere you can take a laptop computer, for example, as long as there is an internet connection. They can save time because they can convert your image and text documents directly to file types that can be sent as faxes. These can be sent to a regular fax number or to another online fax recipient without the loss of quality that may result from printing out documents and putting them through a fax machine. This conversion is also done almost instantly, in contrast to the time it takes to slowly feed each page of a document through a fax machine. It also reduces the waste caused by regular fax machines.

With regular fax machines, every page of every document has to be printed out in order to view it. With online fax services, it is possible to view your faxes on a computer or a mobile device. You don’t have to print out every fax. This allows you to delete junk faxes and unwanted pages and documents without wasting the ink and paper to print them out. The services also help to save time because they may be able to continue to try to send the file until it is received, while some fax machines may not send the file, and after a number of attempts, you may have to feed the pages through the machine and try the process again. You do not have to wait on busy fax lines, because the documents will be stored on the service provider’s secure servers until they are received. The documents you receive as email attachments are usually of better visual quality because they are converted on the computer, and the services may also help to eliminate problems such as lost pages, difficult to read pages, as well as problems like paper jams.