PCorld Article: Free Service Sends Faxes Via E-Mail
Quick viewer and crisp image quality make
receiving faxes via e-mail as convenient as
receiving them on paper.
by Dan Littman, special to PC World
February 10, 1999, 9:02 a.m. PT
All kinds of online companies offer free e-mail, but now
eFax.com is providing free faxes over e-mail.
The idea is simple: the service gives you a fax number
that you provide to one and all. And pretty soon faxes
start arriving in your in-box as electronic attachments.
The reality is just as simple. I was impressed by how
easy it is to set up an eFax.com account. It takes only
a few seconds to register, and the registration form
doesn't ask any nosy questions--it just needs a name,
Zip code, and e-mail address.
While I was perusing a page of FAQs, the eFax.com
site was busy sending me a self-installing fax viewer
and a personal identification number to allow me to
change account details such as my e-mail address.
After running the installer, I faxed some documents to
myself. They arrived in my e-mail box in less than 2
minutes. A full page of text, densely packed with
narrow 10-point type, became a 37KB attachment that
was easy to read on screen.
To see the faxes, I clicked the attachment icon in
Lotus Notes, then clicked Notes' Launch command to
run the viewer. Netscape Mail and Microsoft Outlook
can display eFax.com documents without running the
fax viewer.
What's the catch? The fax number that eFax.com
provided for me is in Illinois. That means long-distance
charges for most people who want to send me a fax,
even if they're just down the street.
How does eFax.com make money on the service? The
company plans to add "premium services" for a fee.
Over the next couple of months, eFax.com users will
be able to send outbound faxes via e-mail; pluck text
from their faxes via automatic OCR; store faxes on the
eFax.com server and retrieve them from the road; and
provide a toll-free number for fax senders. Faxes come
with a splash screen that will carry advertising, though
eFax.com does not allow advertisers to send e-mail or
faxes to its customers directly.
The company, formerly known as JetFax, has a
product line that revolves around fax and imaging
technology. This includes multifunction office
equipment that includes fax/e-mail integration;
HotSend, a utility that lets e-mail recipients see
attachments without the creating application; and
PaperMaster 98, a document-management database.
Related Links
JetFax M900e Adds
Fax-to-E-Mail
HotSend E-Mails
Viewable Files
Symantec Rolls Out
WinFax Pro 9.0,
TalkWorks
External Links
eFax.com
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