Fax Services

Most people like me don’t have anything fancy. A fax machine at home (well really an all-in-one attached to a phone line where you unplug it most of the time for sending or receiving) and then at work a fax machine tied at the front desk. So if you were in the 21st century and even though there is email of PDFs, folks still send you faxes, what do you do? Ask “Kevin Savetz”:http://www.savetz.com/fax/ a very nice guy with a complete analysis of internet fax services.

The grand data is JFax with their “efax.com”:http://efax.com, it is the first thing you hit when you type fax into Google. The $12/month service let’s you send and receive faxes. It installs client software so that you can print-to-fax and you can also from Outlook hit a button. It has a special format and at least for a 12 page document in Word is pretty slow. For free, they let you recieve faxes, but you pay to send. So looking elsewhere…

“Kevin Recommends”:http://www.savetz.com/fax/index.php a bunch of alternatives. For lots of faxing, he likes “Metro Hi Speed”:http://www.metrohispeed.com/corporate/ which for $13/person/month gives you 1,000 pages of inbound plus outbound and you get a discount so that every employee can have their own fax number which is great. No more waiting at hotels. Just get the fax via email and then review it. One nice thing about it is that it doesn’t require any downloadable software. You just email to a _2065551212@metrohispeed.com_ and it will send a fax to (206) 555-1212 with the email message as the cover sheet and any attachments as the rest of the pages of the fax.

They are much higher volume than efax, but they don’t have a lower priced individual plan. Everyone is $14/month. So Metro Hi Speed makes the most sense for a main .umber. We will test to see how reliable it is. We will always have a real fax machine for really urgent stuff, but this is sure convenient.

As an aside, if you don’t need too much faxing, then you can use “Fax1”:http://fax1.com which lets you send to at 12 cents per page with no signup or monthy fees which is just for sending. We need both send and receive I think but at low volumes for individual users.

Kevin also recommends some other plans, but most have changed. For instance, he says “Faxitnice”:http://faxitnice.com has a prepaid plan, but this has morphed into a minimum $6/month charge with prepaid for 50 pages received per month. So it is still half the price of Metrohispeed with no minimum for sending, just a $0.18/page charge.

Kevin didn’t recommend it explicitly, but has a listing for “Maxemail”:http://www.maxemail.com which despite its name as a Lite plan which is $24/year with 100 pages/month inbound and then $0.05/page for each 30 seconds of time sending outbound (figure out what that means, but certainly cheaper than metro hi speed for smaller volumes). Main drawback is you don’t get to pick a local phone number. So for $7/month, you can get Plus which let’s you have a local number for $7/month vs. $2/month.

I’m Rich & Co.

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