There isn’t a shade of doubt in any modern business person’s mind that fax by email is the easiest way to get away forever from the expenses and hassles associated with a fax machine, but one must be very careful about certain aspects, though apparently very minor ones, otherwise there might be a rude shock at month end when a huge bill arrives and you lose the added advantage which you thought you gained when you started to send and receive faxes using email.
Obviously if you are paying too much for your online fax service then the economic advantage of foregoing the need for an extra phone line or effecting substantial savings by not using fax machine or fax server supplies gets neutralized and you end up even Stevens, as it were.
Now what are those important points that you must keep in mind when you start using online fax?
Well, the first and foremost thing is to minutely go through the contact you are about to sign with your internet fax service provider. Many a times exceeding the limit inflates your bill substantially. So, be aware of the limit and ardently strive to remain within it. You should be extra careful when you are sending fax to multiple recipients. Not a single extra person should be included in the list other than those who are actually involved.
Then there is this small matter of adding 1 as a prefix for all domestic faxes. If you don’t do it, the internet fax machine might consider it as an international fax and bill you accordingly. You never thought the humble 1 could make that much of a difference; did you?
You have been hearing how fast internet faxing is and how it has eliminated the need to keep waiting for a fax to transmit but it has been almost an hour you have sent a fax and the recipient is yet to receive it. So, naturally you are getting impatient.
Well, you are operating with only an email address and internet connection, but your email to fax service provider has to actually print out your message and send it as a fax to the recipient. It can take anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes and depends a lot on the work load of the provider. You have opted for paperless fax inside your office by actually outsourcing fax service – the basic activity of printing and faxing a document still remains, only it is done by an outside agency.
There may be another completely unexpected problem at your doorstep when you opt for desktop fax. You have only recently signed up for fax online service and your inbox is already full of junk fax. These faxing service providers have a routine procedure of recycling numbers from erstwhile subscribers. If you happen to get one such fax number you might start receiving unsolicited faxes. The only real and time tested way to get over this is to delete the message when you receive such faxing spam.
If you look at internet fax from a wider perspective, you’ll surely realize that it has more benefits on offer than the problems which come along with it.
Jun 28
