Using Internet to send free faxes

By Lim Tri Santosa

BANDUNG (JP): Sending by fax is still an extremely popular way to communicate, but if you're thinking about buying a new fax machine for your home or office, you might want to stop and take a look at a new fax service first. The service receives faxes for you but soon will be able to send and receive them via the Internet. If you can't quite kick faxing, or you have clients or colleagues who are not yet on-line, this service will provide a step toward a fax-free world.

Get a private fax number

Have you ever imagined your business card to have a U.S. facsimile number? Or pretended that you even have an office there? If you still don't have a fax machine, you might never need one now.

Register your e-mail address to JFAX Service (http://jfax.com), a free fax-to-e-mail service, and you will have a fax number in a city in the U.S. No need to queue in front of the telecom office-desk and wait hours for technicians. After filling out the web-based registration form, submit it with a single click of your mouse, and you will be awarded with a 10- digit fax number somewhere in a U.S. city. It is ongoing and best of all, it is 100 percent free of charge.

Your fax number can receive as many faxes as the caller sends with no extra charges. This fax number is your own private number, so if you change your e-mail address then you can log on to your account to change it with the pin password already given to you at registration time.

Unfortunately, you can't choose the city, as the service will give you any randomly available fax number they have in the U.S. Lucky for me, I got my number in Fresno city, California, where a lot of my friends and family live. Your fax number must be utilized with at least two faxes a month, otherwise JFAX reserves the right to terminate your number in the event your usage of such service falls below this minimum usage level. There is no limit of the pages one can receive.

How does it work? When someone sends documents to your fax number, the JFAX server will convert them to a TIFF image file and then will send it to your e-mail address as an attachment. Don't worry, it will not burden your Internet connection time when downloading it, as the TIFF attachment is small (on average only 30 KB per page). All fax pages will be delivered in one TIFF file attachment, thus you can manage and print your file easily. Windows(r) image software, such as Imaging for Windows(r) (Under Accessories Program Group) are required to use the TIFF file. Faxes appear exactly as they would from a standard facsimile, right down to the time and date stamp on top.

I have already done some tests to check how fast they can compress and send the faxes to my e-mail address. All came to my mailbox within a minute, and you can log into your account to see your fax-receiving status report. You won't miss any important fax messages.

This service is great if you are on the road or if you want to bypass the company facsimile when you're expecting a confidential message.

It also will improve your image, especially with your international business contacts, by having your number in the U.S. I still remember applying for a new line for a company which I have been working with, and it was a one-week wait for installation and yet another one month for activation. I almost don't believe that this service will give you a line for free with just one click of the mouse.

Send free fax

Welcome to the free fax sending service. The TPC.INT service (http://www-usa.tpc.int) is a collection of free fax servers you may use to send faxes to many locations around the world including Indonesia (only some cities). Before sending any faxes, it is better to see the supported area-coverage list. This fax service allows you to send faxes to fax machines via Internet. You can type or copy and paste your document into the message box (http://www-usa.tpc.int/sendfax.html).

You can also fax via your e-mail program. If you send a plain text e-mail message to be faxed by TPC.INT, the fax server will include basic information about you on the cover page, including the e-mail address and the e-mail message identification. A cover page is included with every fax sent by TPC.INT without exception.

To send a fax by e-mail, send a message to remote- printer.recipient_name@faxnumber.iddd.tpc.int, where

In the above example: the recipient's name is John Doe, Indonesia's country code is 62, the area code is 31 for Surabaya and the remainder is the fax number. Most of the time, your fax is sent immediately. Only sometimes it is delayed. When the transmission succeeds or fails, an e-mail message will be sent back to you informing the fax was sent or giving the information about any problems. In the near future, they will provide you with free global fax service covering the rest of the world. By the way, now I can send faxes everyday to my customers in Surabaya with only a local call charge.

There is PeopleFax Service (http://peoplefax.com) which allows anyone to send free fax messages anytime and anywhere to the U.S. This service covers all cities in the U.S. It is a fully automated, secured web-based tool, which helps send faxes at the click of a mouse. All you need is your web-browser, there is no need for any special software. Anyone can register and log on to this web-page from anywhere in the world, just enter the destination fax number in the U.S. and either type in a message into the message box or attach an MS-Word file and click the send button. Your fax message and/or the MS-Word file will be converted into a fax file and sent directly to the recipient's fax number. This site has features to check whether your fax message has already been sent, failed or on the waiting list to be faxed.

The benefits

My old auntie doesn't have a computer or know anything about them or the Internet, but she has a fax machine in her apartment in Fresno. All she has to do is take a sheet of paper, write down a message, and fax it to my Fresno fax number. I reply to it with the above free fax sending service. It is a great pleasure that we can have a two-way communication even though she is not a member of the Internet society.

Combining the power of the above free fax services, we can communicate with our friends, family and business associates in the U.S. or almost anywhere in the world for free. Try the above free fax services to send faxes to your own private fax number that you get from JFAX Service. You don't need to worry about running out of fax paper, having an electricity shutdown, accidentally pouring coffee onto the machine or any wire installations. And the best thing is, you don't have to buy a fax machine. Fax machines use a direct phone line which means high costs compared to sending a fax using these services on the Internet. It is worth it to slash your international fax bills, isn't it? What else are you waiting for? Go for it.