The fax just won’t go away, will it? I’m set up for receiving faxes from other people (via a Yac.com telephone number) but not for sending. However, I think I’ve arrived at a solution.
But let’s rewind a little first. The problem with fax machines is that they need their own dedicated phone line, making them expensive pieces of kit considering how relatively little they get used nowadays by many people. So far this year, I’ve had to send precisely two faxes, involving a round trip of 12 miles to the nearest library.
But while browsing through the Extras for Skype, I discovered a plug-in that enables users to send faxes straight from the desktop or scanner. At just 15p a pop it’s a lot more efficient than an hour out of the office to go to the library.
Here is a search at Skype using the keyword, fax. In total there are five plug-ins to choose from. For the record, I chose PamFax, mainly because it was the first one I stumbled across and it lets me use my existing Skype credit to send the fax, bing, bang, bosh with the minimum of fuss and faffing around.
However, if I were going to be sending faxes regularly I would definitely compare the others out of curiosity as some enable faxes to be received into Skype as well. Though, to be fair, the PamFax installation was simple, the message was sent first go and there’s a portal to check on progress. In the event, the fax was successfully sent in less than five minutes.
Meanwhile, in other related news, Skype has announced that users have now talked with one another for more than 100 billion minutes (100,000,000,000) using free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls since Skype launched in 2003.
According to Skype, “This mind-boggling number equates to one minute of free talk for every man, woman and child that has ever walked the Earth!
“To put this into further perspective, Skype has only been in business for about 4.5 years (approximately 2,365,200 minutes). Yet people have used Skype to talk for more than 69,444,444 days (more than 190,258 years). Go back 150,000 years, if a woolly mammoth and a sabre-toothed tiger had started talking for free on Skype, they would still be chatting away today… and with 40,258 years to go!
“It took McDonald’s nearly 40 years to serve 100 billion hamburgers (from 1955 to 1994). And it’s taken Skype just over four years to hit the 100 billion free minutes mark which is pretty amazing!”
