Efax.com can help save cash and improve efficiency

I work from home and needed to receive faxes occasionally. I started out with the free service, but quickly exceeded my limit and now must pay a monthly fee.

HOW IT WORKS

You have to decide if you want to start with the free trial or if you want to start paying immediately. Keep in mind that the "free" service charges .10 per page to send faxes. It is only free to receive them. Also, outgoing faxes in the "free" service may have advertisements tucked into the margins of your documents.

On the site (www.efax.com) you can download software that will enable you to read your faxes. They will also assign you a fax number. For the free service, you can not get a local number. However, even with the pay service, they don't guarantee a local number.

When you receive a fax, you get an email notification. You click on a link in the email which opens the efax software and you can view the fax. At that point, you can print it. You can also save it to your hard drive. Efax does not store your faxes, but you can leave them on your email. Long faxes come in large files so they take up a lot of space on your email.

If you want to send a fax, you can email the document to efax. There are other ways to integrate efax into your computer systems as well, although they are beyond my technical ability.

WinFax Pro

Amazon.co.uk Review
When you think of fax software you inevitably think of WinFax Pro, a utility that has been around for many moons but which has evolved beyond recognition since its first release. That said, its basic faxing functionality remains unchanged and as solid as ever. And along the way it's picked up some useful bells and whistles. The new version can now be set up as a fax server on small peer networks. It originally integrated with Exchange and Outlook and the new version extends this to Outlook Express and the contact manager, Goldmine. You can now "e-mail" a fax to a recipient--this odd-ball option sends a 60KB fax viewer program as an attachment with the fax file.
Nice touches abound: you can schedule fax broadcasts to multiple recipients and set it to spool to two modems. WinFax Pro can also notify you of incoming faxes via a system-tray icon, cell phone or pager. And if you need to turn an incoming fax in to editable text, you can do it with its built-in OCR facility, though this is more a "lite" version and not quite as accurate as current stand-alone OCR packages.

There is a new "Drag and Drop Depot" icon on the desktop for quick despatching of documents. A new high-quality photo option improves print quality at the cost of extending transmission times. And if you are plagued by junk faxes, there is a new spam filter, though you will need a modem that supports Caller ID and subscribe to the service with your phone company first. When you buy a modem these days, often as not you will get a "lite" fax program with it. If you only need to send/receive faxes occasionally, this is probably sufficient. But if faxing is a key element of your work, you will want something a bit better and with a bit more power, and WinFax Pro 10.0 more than fits the bill. --Roger Gann

Brother Fax 575

Plain paper, thermal ribbon transfer. This budget fax machine has a lot to offer for personal use. Its memory is 512KB and it can store up to 25 pages in memory, far fewer than the more expensive Canon below. There is a ten-page automatic document feeder and a 50-sheet output capacity. It can make black-and-white copies and broadcast faxes up to 104 locations.

Fax Info

Multifunctional devices
Many fax machines can be connected to a computer to serve as a printer and/or a computer scanner. And if you use a printer for mailing purposes, check if you can print onto envelopes or labels from the fax machine you're considering buying.

Legal-sized faxes
Firms that receive faxes on legal-sized paper should look for a machine with two paper drawers. This will allow legal- and letter-sized faxes to be printed on appropriately sized pages without switching paper trays.
Service contracts
If you expect to receive more than 50 faxed pages per day, a service contract makes sense. Make sure your agreement includes a backup machine in case of a breakdown.

Incoming fax pages
Some fax machines print the pages of incoming faxes last page first, meaning you'll have to reshuffle the pages into the correct order before reading. If you find this a hindrance, don't purchase a machine with this feature.

WinFax Pro 10.0

WinFax Pro isn't the cheapest fax package on the market, but it's by far the best. Symantec's $99.95 faxing powerhouse excels at the basics--sending and receiving faxes--while tossing in enough bells and whistles to please even the most discriminating tastes. Examples? You can send faxes in photo-quality mode--a boon to anyone sending graphics or pictures via fax--or deliver them as e-mail attachments. WinFax automatically imports your contacts from popular PIMs such as Microsoft Outlook, it performs fast and accurate optical character recognition (OCR) on incoming faxes, and it spell-checks the messages you send. It even allows you to import images directly from your scanner and digital camera. While some of WinFax's competitors contain one or even several of these features, none matches WinFax's slickness, intelligence, and ease of use.

GFI FAXmaker

GFI FAXmaker is the leading fax server for Exchange Server, Lotus and SMTP/POP3 servers. Without installing additional client software, users can send and receive faxes directly from Outlook or any other email clients. GFI FAXmaker fully integrates with Active Directory, eliminating the need for a separate fax server user database.

GFI FAXmaker for Exchange/SMTP features include a multi-line fax server, fax antispam, inbound fax routing, print to fax driver for Windows, support for server-based rendering of Office documents, Word mail merge support, allowing users to create personalized fax mailings, fax management features and more. Other enterprise features include remote user and fax server administration, least cost routing, user configuration profiles, remote viewing of fax server status, Brooktrout and ISDN card support and more.

GFI FAXmaker also allows your users to send and receive SMS messages from Outlook.

GFI FAXmaker is the most competitively priced fax server on the market: A 25-user version sells for $695 and a 100-user FAXmaker sells for $1950.

WinFax Pro 8.0

I probably work with my PC like most people: I rarely fax from my PC but I do like to be able to if the need somehow comes up. There are times when I find myself in a situation where I need to work away from the office for a few days or weeks and there is no stand-alone fax machine available. At times like that I need a full-strength, proper fax program. But I don't need an industrial strength faxing and communications centre built around fax capabilities running around loose full-time on my system either. And that's the problem with WinFax Pro. It just does way too much and wants to change my life to one that is somehow centred on sending, receiving, broadcasting, eating and sleeping faxes. Fortunately it's flexible and allows you to trim things down a bit so it doesn't seem like your computer communications has turned into a fax-centric operating system all to itself.
Perhaps Symantec has conducted focus groups and usability studies that told them fax software buyers want to set up sophisticated faxing servers that can broadcast in multiple languages, answer phones and schedule appointments and pick up your dry cleaning. And receive a humble fax now and then. Or maybe they just want to be sure every possible bell and every possible whistle their faxing ponytails and propheads could come up with is included so nobody will go away feeling hungry. I mean come on, "remote fax retrieval"? I guess someone does that now and then. Somebody email me and tell me I'm wrong.

Now after I've let all that out, let me back up and say that all this gnarly stuff they include does allow you to set things up quite comfortably to suit your own faxing style. But you have to be willing to fiddle around with preference settings and such for a couple of hours. For instance, setting up custom dialling scripts lets you use different credit cards from different locations - like hotels. I hate to admit it but I've spent hours sitting around with my laptop in hotel rooms trying to dial part of an access number and click on the communications software in perfect synchronisation to get some crazy 79 digit phone number/credit card number-combination connection. It's important to get your out-of-town connection costs on the corporate credit card if at all possible. WinFax Pro helps you to do just that. The point being, you can choose some of the bells and whistles and carefully tweak them to get a nice little faxing routine built into your system. But you have to kind of enjoy fiddling with software like that to get there.