Internet Fax

Internet fax is becoming more and more popular among businesses looking for affordable and easy ways to keep in touch with clients. And no wonder: Internet fax is affordable, simple and mobile. In other words, it fits right into the current climate of doing business online from various locations at any time that’s convenient for clients.

Businesspeople have become so accustomed to e-mail and other forms of online communication that using an old-fashioned fax machine can seem like a real hassle. That’s because, compared with the simplicity and accessibility of e-mail, fax machines are complicated to use.

Perhaps the single key advantage of Internet fax is that it makes faxing as easy as e-mail. With Internet fax, you can receive faxes as e-mail attachments in various electronic formats (e.g. PDF, TIFF). This means you can choose to print a fax on paper using a standard office printer—or not, if you only need the information on your computer.

Internet fax saves money since there’s no need for a fax-machine dedicated phone line, or purchases of special toner/ink and paper for the machine.

With Internet fax, there is no more standing around at the fax machine waiting for an important fax to come in; you can receive it any place you have Internet access (which these days is just about anywhere). The sender of the fax can do so using a regular fax machine, and you receive it seamlessly as an e-mail attachment. Simple.

Another advantage of Internet fax is that it ensures faxes get to the right person in a timely and confidential manner. With traditional faxing, the whole office usually shared one or a few fax machines. Any fax that came in could be accidentally picked up by the wrong person, a problem both for general faxes (since the actual recipient may think the fax didn’t come through) and for confidential faxes (for obvious reasons).

Internet fax is one of those technologies that seamlessly bridges older and newer forms of communication without inconveniencing people on either side of that divide. It’s definitely a service to consider for making document sharing faster and easier.

What’s New With Internet Fax?

Many companies are considering an Internet fax service so they can receive faxes not on paper (the “old fashioned” way) but as e-mail attachments. This is a relatively new development in the evolution of document exchange, and one that is pretty compelling for boosting productivity and streamlining business processes.

In particular, Internet fax services like that offered by RingCentral let the user decide the best way to view a fax—as a TIFF file or as a PDF document. The flexibility to receive faxes in the most convenient format is a key benefit of fax-to-email.

Another thing that’s new with incoming Internet fax services is the ability to pay a flat monthly rate rather than being charged per-fax. Especially for companies that get a lot of faxes, this feature can translate into significant cost savings.

Fax-to-email is definitely desirable for companies with employee who are frequently mobile—working at locations other than the office. It’s also very convenient for anyone who does a lot of traveling but still needs to receive faxes in a timely manner. With an incoming Internet fax service, such users can receive their faxes from any location where they have access to e-mail. This means faxes get to their recipients faster and business can go on without delays.

Since so much of business today is done electronically, receiving faxes as email attachments translates to reduced costs associated with maintaining and using a traditional fax machine (paper, toner). It also eliminates the need to maintain a phone line for receiving faxes via a fax machine.

Also, since faxes received by email are already in electronic form, they can be easily save on a computer for future reference—no hanging files and cabinet needed!