Email, the web and internet telephony may be the communications media of choice these days, but there’s still room for the humble fax. Despite our global high speed connections, most companies still want to see a signature on an agreement rather than a mouse click.
And a new web site, FaxZero.com is evidently of the same opinion, for they have just launched a free fax service. By completing a quick online form, users can fax any Microsoft Word file, PDF document, Excel workbook, or text file direct from their computer to North America and Puerto Rico for free.
Predictably, there are limitations to the free service, but if you only require to send the odd fax now and again most small to micro-sized businesses should be able to live with them. Certainly, it will be a lot cheaper than forking out for a dedicated phone line for a fax machine, a necessity these days with broadband. Namely, the limitations on FaxZero.com’s free service are a restriction to two faxes of up to three pages each per day and the placing of an advert on the cover page.
If you need to send more than two faxes per day, bigger documents or wish to ditch the advertising, there is a subscription service. This costs $1.79 (approx. 96p) per fax and allows users to send up to 10 pages, with no cover page ad, and no two-fax-per-day limit.
Faxes are usually delivered within minutes. Once successfully loaded onto their system, FaxZero.com notifies the sender with a confirmation e-mail message. The email contains a link, which has to be clicked in order to transmit the fax to the recipient.
A follow up email within 20 minutes confirms whether the fax message has been successfully delivered or not. Up to seven attempts are made to deliver the fax.
The email-to-fax and fax-to-email market is, though, quite a crowded place, with a number of providers offering a variety of free and subscription services. Among some of the best known are:
faxtastic.co.uk
efax.co.uk
yac.com
faxmenow
