Most of us use traditional fax machines to send and receive faxes. However, they are quite expensive to use. You have to incur one time setup fee, as well as monthly recurring fee. Apart from that, you have to be at the physical location of your fax machine to send and receive faxes.
A very neat solution to this is to use online fax service. To start with that, you are assigned a fax number like you would get with your traditional fax service. After that, if anyone sends you a fax, it is forwarded to your email address as an attachment. This means that you do not need a physical fax machine, and you can check your faxes anywhere you can check your email. Amazing, isn’t it!
To send the fax, you just go to the website of your online fax service provider, and then specify the fax number where you want to send fax. You can send a document, or type up a message to be sent as fax. Then it is sent to the fax number and your recepient gets it as any other normal fax he/she would get. Its that easy!
However, the biggest problem with such online fax services is that they carry a monthly recurring cost – anywhere between $8 and above. Here I would tell you how to setup your own free online fax service completely free. No registration fee, no monthly fee, no setup charges. Totally Free.
To setup a free online fax account, you need two things:
- A service that can give you a free Fax number.
- A service that lets you send online faxes for free.
Free Online Fax Number:
To start with, you need a free online fax number. We like following free fax number providers:
1) K7 Fax: This is our favorite. It gives you a free fax number on which anyone can send a fax. It delivers the fax to your email as an attachment. Apart from that, it also provides a mailbox in which your faxes are started. The same fax number can also to be used to receive voicemail for free. Read more about this free fax service here.
2) eFax Free: The second choice to get a free fax number is a free account with eFax. It also works a lot like K7, but the major limitation with this is that you need to install special eFax software to open attachments that it sends in your mail. However, it is also free, and works well. Read more about it here.
Send Free Online Fax:
Once you have chosen a free fax number from the above services, you can just start distributing it to those who need to send fax to you. If you need to send a fax yourself, you can use one of the service below:
Send Free Fax in U.S. and Canada: There are 2 services that we like to send fax for free in U.S. and Canada. Our favorite is GotFreeFax. The best part is that it does not adds any logo or advertisement on your fax message. So, it keeps looking professsional looking. Apart from that, the online interface is very easy to use, and you can compose a text message in normal text as well as Rich text and even attach doc or PDF. Read more about it here.
The second service that we like to send free fax in U.S. and Canada is FaxZero. It also works in same fashion as GotFreeFax, but it adds logo on the cover page of fax. But, hey, it’s free. Read more about it here.
Send Free Fax to 40 countries in the world: If you need to send fax to some other country, then you should try FreeFax Button. It lets you send fax to 40 countries in the world, including U.K., Australia, China, and many others. Even though it can send fax to U.S. and Canada as well, but we do not prefer it for that as the interface is not very intuitive, and it does not sends confirmation in email. Read more about it here.
Using above services, you can send and receive faxes absolutely free without a need to spend any money. If you know about any other services that provide free fax service, please mention in Comments.