My husband is self employed and works from a home office. Most of his work used to be mailed but in recent years everything comes and goes by fax. Sending and receiving faxes at outside facilities typically costs at least $1. a page. We did purchase a fax machine (actually an all in one-fax, printer, copier) but having only one phone line receiving faxes remained a problem. It is difficult to set up the machine to receive faxes and still use our existing answering machine. When we are home, faxes weren’t able to come in if we were online or on the phone. If the phone rang we would have to answer it and then if it sounded like a fax we would have to race to the fax machine and hit start. So having a fax machine was great for sending only.
I happened on a site called efax.com. All you have to do is register at the site and you are given a phone number. It’s free! You simply give this number out as your fax number and faxes come to you as email. You download a small program called efax messenger to open and manipulate the faxes. We’ve been using this progam for almost 2 years now and it’s great. We don’t have to be concerned that the fax machine will run out of paper or ink or jam. My husband just sits down at the computer when he comes in and checks his email. He opens and reads each fax printing only those portions he needs.
Efax also has some programs for a monthly fee. You can have a local or toll free number and send faxes that you type or scan into the computer.
Having online fax capability has been very helpful and a cost saver for my husband’s small business. We also occasionally use it for family (getting school health forms from our Doctor, insurance info etc.