Still Using a Traditional Fax Machine?

Did you know that Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received the first patent for a fax machine in 1843? According to About.com the first fax was actually sent over telegraph wires in 1860 from Paris. While technology has advanced, the theory is still the same, sending words and images over a telephone line or radio broadcast. It’s a 167 years later and many of us are still using the same method. Is your company still paying for a phone line connected to a traditional fax machine? It’s expensive compared to the alternatives available today. Not to mention if you are mobile, you can’t access your faxes until you physically walk up to the fax machine. If you only have one phone line, you can’t receive faxes until you get to your home or office, turn on the fax machine and wait.

Best alternative: use internet faxing to save money and reduce faxing headaches. There are a variety of internet faxing sites that are cheap and allow you to access your faxes anywhere. Most sites have good spam control filters as well. I replaced my fax line with Myfax.com a few months ago and it’s been a really good service. I still have my fax machine to send faxes with but I am not paying for a separate phone line. Myfax costs just 10 dollars per month which includes up to 200 incoming and 100 outgoing pages. I also like the fact that the faxes can be stored as PDF’s and I can resend them right from Myfax if I need to without losing image quality. I have not received one junk fax to date, but the best part is that it saves my incoming and outgoing faxes for one year so I never have to worry about losing a document.

There is another service called E-fax that I am familiar with but is a little more costly at $16.95 a month and they charge separately for outgoing faxes. Both services work primarily the same and have been extremely reliable. If you already have a fax number, both services have the ability to “port” your existing number to their service, but I was warned it could take up to six weeks to do, so I opted for a new number.

Privacy was a major concern of mine because of the nature of my work. There are two options for receiving faxes, email delivery and on line delivery. I selected the on line option because I am required to log in and download my faxes. While I admit just getting the fax as an email attachment would be more convenient, the on line option allows for greater security because of the encryption. Email is very insecure and your faxes could be available for anyone to see.

It only takes minutes to set up and with Myfax you can get a 30 day trial before you sign up. No more waiting for the phone guy to set up the line and no taxes either! Because it’s internet based they don’t charge all those FCC and Federal taxes and fees you are used to seeing on your phone bill. You can easily save up to $15 a month with this service which is $180 per year.