Faxes getting costly? Send, receive via e-mail

April 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

I recently bought a new fax machine for my home office. I also maintain a separate phone number as my fax line. While the phone line needs to only be a basic service line, there’s still the monthly line charge along with long distance charges for all of my out of area outgoing faxes. Plus there’s the cost of disposables, such as special inkjet paper and the ink cartridges that always seem to run out of ink at the most inconvenient time.

Add everything up and I discover that I’m paying some hefty dollars for the luxury of maintaining a fax machine. And there are other annoyances such as the physical machine itself. It takes up valuable space in my home office. It’s plugged in, which means there’s another power cord I have to deal with. When a fax arrives, there’s an annoying phone ringing sound, and the noise it makes printing out the fax is disconcerting since mine is on a shelf only about a foot away from my left ear. There has to be a better way of faxing in this day and age and of course, there really is.

MyFax is an Internet fax service that lets you send and receive faxes via your Internet connection but it lets you do it in much the same way as you would send and receive e-mail. You can set up a MyFax account in a few minutes at their Web site and once it’s set up, you can immediately begin to fax. First of all, MyFax is comparatively inexpensive to an ordinary fax machine. For starters, you really don’t have any of that faxing overhead. There’s no fax machine with all of its disposable costs, no long distance telephone charges and no second phone line.

MyFax assigns you a toll-free fax number you give out. Your clients never pay long-distance charges to fax you. In this competitive business world, free faxing to you gives you an edge right out of the gate. Plus that toll free number costs you nothing.

If you work in a public location, MyFax gives you a whole lot of extra security since your faxes don’t sit in the fax machine’s receiving tray where anyone can see it. Plus you don’t have to get up to get your faxes anymore. They come straight to your e-mail inbox for you to read, save and print out. You decide what makes it to paper, what gets deleted and what gets saved for later reference.

To send a fax using MyFax, you simply use your e-mail program but in the “To:” field, you put in the fax machine’s area and telephone number and add on the “myfax.com” suffix. From there, it’s pretty much like sending any other e-mail. You fill in the subject field, add an attachment or type in the text and click send.

But instead of being e-mailed, the subject, text and attachment are first sent to the MyFax servers, where it is then sent over the phone lines to the receiving fax machine number you placed in the sending field. That’s it and it’s just that simple.

With MyFax, your faxes aren’t subject to the many technical glitches that can occur using a regular fax machine. Your virtual fax machine is always on, for one thing. A sender never gets an annoying busy signal, which can really frustrate someone trying to send you that important fax. This works even if your computer is turned off. The next time you access your e-mail, you get the fax. Typically, a sending or receiving fax machine will tie up the line for several minutes. With MyFax, your fax machine is always ready to send and receive.

Compared with a fax machine setup that can cost you hundreds, MyFax is really inexpensive, beginning at $10 a month. And since your faxes are always accessible from anywhere you have Internet access, it’s like having a fax machine wherever you go. And that’s the fax.

For more information, visit www.myfax.com.

Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. For more information, visit his Web site at www.computeramerica.com.

2010 McClatchy Tribune