One day faxes will become obsolete, but for now it's hard not to have a fax number because some people insist on sending you faxes. And some people insist on being sent documents by fax. Even though faxes haven't become obsolete I regard fax machines as such.
A fax machine can only be in one physical location, which means to send or receive faxes you have to go to that location. And if the machine runs out of paper then you won't be getting that important fax, will you? Same thing if the power goes out. The solution is to get an online fax service.
For years I've used eFax.com. I have a local number so people have the sense that they are sending the fax to a location in New Orleans (which for some reason seems to make people feel better). In reality the faxes go to some secure location that has high-speed reliable internet access. The faxes are captured as images and then sent to me by email. Sending faxes is the same process in reverse: I upload or email the document to eFax and they send it to the recipient's fax machine (or fax service).
I like eFax, but it's kind of pricey. The basic account is $16/month for 30 pages of sent faxes and 130 of received faxes. I don't think I've ever exceeded the minimums, but if you do it's an extra .10 or .15 cents per page, depending on if you are sending or receiving.
A friend of mine uses Myfax.com and, after checking it out I have to say that I'm impressed. It has all the same features as eFax, but at a lower cost: $10/month for 100 sent pages and 200 received. Also, when you receive a fax by email from MyFax there is a link to click if you want the fax to be flagged as a junk fax.
Nice.
P.S. If you want a better practice, check out this Ultimate Guide.
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eFax is run by a bunch of crooks. Just look online at the BBB and you’ll see how many complaints are against them. We filed one several months ago and they simply never responded.
I would NEVER sign up with that company if I had to do it over again. Our company has had the same fax number for the past 4 years with eFax. We finally decided to go with another provider. Now eFax claims that we can not port our number out. It was my understanding that under FCC regulations, companies are obligated to port customer’s numbers if they decide to leave. However, further research revealed a loophole of sorts for eFax since they are not technically a telecommunications provider.
I recently started using efax, and I think it is very expensive…I want to switch to another company but I am being told that I can not take the fax number with me. Is there a way out??
there are a lot of things to consider when buying a fax. Ernie has covered a few of the top companies and I would say his review is dead on.
I am using RingCentral and aside from some challenges with customer service I have been pleased.
Here’s an article on getting free fax numbers and some of the research I found, pretty interesting.
https://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Get-a-Free-Fax-Number-From-Internet-Fax-Services&id=2551116
I used to use eFax, but switched a few years back to MaxEmail, which I LOVE. I think it costs about $25 a year, plus a small charge for each page you send (most faxes I send come to about 15 cents), and incoming faxes are free. It is all very easy, and I can attach any document type I want (pdf, gif, MS Word, Excel), and it will send it–I don’t even have to worry about scanning it. My mother uses my service often, because it is so convenient. I would definitely recommend it.
I’ve been using efax for a few years now. At first I was as happy as a lark, good pricing, but then all of a sudden without warning the price just about doubled without any warning. And I know that they have overcharged us on outgoing faxes, they pre-charge for it, and if you are real busy, you do not follow-up and they know it, so I will be happy to try myfax.com and say later days to efax who is now in my opinion a big rip-off company and greedy. Happy 2010 from California. If you are into RE Investing and looking for great ROI, contact us! Thanks — DawnAFR INVESTMENTS dawn@afrcapital.com… we do what is right and make an honest living…
I recently signed on to efax for a free month. What a mistake. I thought I’d continue on a month to month basis. First, they charged my account for a full year subscription, not a monthly. Then, they charged my account again for the full year, instead of crediting me. This happened on Oct 15 and I still have no luck in getting my money back ($339.00). Have made numerous calls to their billing dept. (located in India) each time I’m assured my refund will be processed within 48 hours… never happened. I finally was connected to a call center in California and I was also told that a 48 hour response is impossible… 30 days is the minimum. I reminded them that 3 different customer service reps had assured me I would have a 48 hour response. Supposedly, a “supervisor” is looking into my refund, she was to call me back within the hour…. that was 2 days ago, haven’t heard a word.
Never again
I recently setup one of our employees with SRFax. The thing I found most appealing, aside from the fact that their price is lower than all of the others, is that you can get an 800 number at no addition charge. So, to Ernie’s point, the number will look local no matter where you are and it won’t cost the sender anything.
I agree with Steven. I just noticed a $16.95 charge from eFax on my card, looked at the statement and found out that they have been charging the card even though I called in February to cancel the service.
All of eFax’s fax numbers are proprietary (they snuck that into the fine print on the customer service agreement), so you are unable to transfer it over to myFax which is, by far, a more superior internet fax service and offers better value for the money.
I’m an IT Field Engineer who uses fax for things like work orders, etc, and I just wanted to let you know that eFax is a ripoff company. Maybe they started off more honest, but on Ripoffreport.com there are 41 reports of people who have called, chatted online with a rep, etc to cancel their account, told the account was cancelled, then keep receiving monthly (or even annual!!) charges which they are then told are non-reversible, if the company even keeps up a correspondence with you. I recently found out my account that was cancelled last year wasn’t really cancelled and they have been billing me $17 a month for 8 months. Now they owe me $135 and refuse to pay it all. They credited my account $33 for some strange reason and refuse to answer any emails or credit the rest of my money even though a manager by the name of Jeffrey admitted that it was their mistake and to contact their ‘financing department’. Long story short, I filed a report for fraud on BofA, they temporarily credited my account, and are looking into the matter which could take up to 90 days. Their policy is not to refund money for anything more than 60 days old on your statement, but in the case of fraud I think they are more lenient. I hope more people report this company for their thievery!!!! Also if you want to save a LOT of money on this service check out MaxEmail.com, they are about $2/month! Very reliable, used them for over a year now, and have never had a problem. Its about $24/year and you get plenty of send/receive limit. Good luck cancelling eFax, I would recommend having the bank do a stop payment to refuse any more charges from j2 Global Communications when you close your account..
I’ve tried a couple of VOIP solutions including one with fax. The one that looked promising was Ring Central. We send faxes to certain federal officials. They complained that our faxes were too light to read in many instances. After we lost about three days of voice calls, we dropped Ring Central and went with AT&T lines and an Aastra asterisk device (we were using Aastra phones with the Ring Central service). We even added a Xerox Work Centre 4150X. Previously, I managed a satellite office of a mega firm that used VOIP at the satellite office with calls routed through the home office. It was great when it worked but when it did not our revenues dived. We had an IT guy full time making close to six figures running everything (and this is Oklahoma so figure over $100,000 elsewhere). Using Vonage in your home for a land line in this world of every one having a cell phone is one thing… But, trusting important business communications to soft fax and VOIP to me has not been reliable or a savings whether in a mega firm setting or my own current small boutique practice. I’m always looking to shave overhead. I’ve not yet personally been involved in a situation where VOIP or soft fax did anything but cost more money than a more traditional way of getting it done.
I’ve been using metrofax (metrofax.com) with pretty good results. I can get up to 1,000 pages (combined sent and received) a month for $12.95. Their FAQ says you can keep your fax number but in my case, they do not offer a New Hampshire area code so this was not possible. Very periodically I get people saying the fax was busy, which the metrofax tech support says should not be happening. Other than that, I am very satisfied with the service. One of my favorite things about it, and this is probably true of the others as well, is that, in addition to the reduction in paper, it automatically saves your sent faxes so you have proof positive a fax was successfully sent.
Not an ad just an alternative consideration. I’m a solo and have used maxemail (www.maxemail.com) for a number of years and even used their service remotely on my Treo to send an extremely large file while on vacation and without my laptop. I especially like the one year fax retention service which I use for backup/audit. I think I’m about $80/year. Good luck with the new service, I always thought efax was a little “lite” for legal professionals.
Here is a suggestion . . . tell your current fax number provider (AT&T in my case) that you plan to drop the fax line in order to go with an on-line fax service. AT&T “discovered” that they could lower my monthly bill by nearly $100 per month without any reduction in services. I wish that VOIP was something that I trusted, but Katrina made me devoted to hardlines.
Hey Krystin:
Thanks! I checked with MyFax (called the toll free number and got a helpful representative right away, which was confidence inspiring!). She said that the ‘certain circumstances’ under which I could port my eFax number over would be if I had ported the number to eFax initially, which I didn’t. Since they assigned the number they control it and won’t release it.
Perhaps this violates some law or reg, but I’m not interested in mounting a legal battle so I accept my fate and will have to live with having a new fax number. As I said, it’s not a big deal for me because I wasn’t having a lot of inbound faxes anyway. So I’ll just update my information in the proper places and go forward that way.
I noticed this on the MyFax website in the Knowledge Base section…
Can I keep my fax number?
Yes. You can call-forward your existing fax number(s) to your new MyFax number or in certaincircumstances, you can have your existing fax number ported to MyFax.
So you might not have to get a new fax number after all!
My virtual PBX service, Vocalocity, provides this service for free and without unit of page costs for outgoing. I was not able to transfer my number from EFax, however.
No, I’ll have to switch numbers. But that’s not a big deal since I don’t really receive a lot of faxes and when I do it’s after someone asks me for the number. I do get a fair number of junk faxes so I’ll be happy to leave those on the old service.
Were you able to keep the same fax number or did you have to switch it? Keep up the great blogs!
I was with efax before as well, and I switched to Popfax, i find it cheaper, easier and more reliable. Popfax offer free number portability, so i kept the same number as I had before.