With Myfax, Who Needs a Fax Machine?
Thanks to the power of the internet, we’re able to send and receive faxes from anywhere, without needing a landline or even a phone line. Better yet, we even have an assigned phone number that we can give out to people- any fax sent to the number is forwarded automatically and quickly to the email address we chose. To send a fax, we simply send an email to a specific email address- it’s that simple.
We’ve tried several internet fax companies, but MyFax stands out for it’s reasonable rates, good customer service, and its speed. Other services we’ve tried simply don’t compare: eFax is quite a bit more expensive and has a clunkier interface, Faxitnice is great only if you want to send occasional faxes (and they cost $5 each), and GreenFax doesn’t have nearly as many area codes or local numbers, lacking the 808 area code for instance. Also, the turn around time on services vary widely- with eFax it could take up to 20 minutes for a fax to be sent or to appear in our inbox. MyFax typically forwarded faxes to us within 3 minutes, and sent our faxes within 2 minutes.
Every service has issues though and MyFax isn’t perfect- they offer an Outlook integration plugin, but it doesn’t work reliably and is fairly hard to use. You’re also limited to storing your faxes online for 14 days, and the system doesn’t (by default, at least) keep a copy of faxes that you’ve sent. Finally, there are a limited number of types of documents that you can attach and have it send- but almost anything you would try is available (45 types in all, from PNG to EPS and PDF).
On the plus side, you can schedule faxes in advance, send unlimited pages, have them automatically retry on failure, and get a toll-free number if you need one. It even notifies you if there is a problem, like when we tried to fax a voice number. Unlike some services, MyFax also allows you to add several email addresses to your account, so that they can also send faxes easily.
I’m not sure that faxes will ever be fun- but internet faxing certainly makes the process simpler, cheaper, faster, and more environmentally friendly than the old way. Email still is our preferred method for sending information, but for those business situations where something must be sent by fax- MyFax is the way to go.
