Online Fax Alternatives

I’ve recently reconfigured my broadband, so now the only reason I still have a land line is to support a traditional dumb fax machine. I’d like to kill that too.

Our home business sends 2-3 faxes / day & receives similar. Typically 3 pages but occasionally 10-15. All senders & recipients are in the US.

For the incoming ones, often the next step for us is to scan them into a PC for OCR into Word. Many of our customers have moved to emailing us docs, but not all. And if they only have an original on paper, we’re gonna get it as fax; they’re not going to learn to scan & email just for us.
So the question is: Looking for recommendations for some service we could use where:

A) We can email or upload a doc or group of docs to them in some format and have them transmit it via plain old fax to a recipient’s plan old fax machine.

B) Somebody can use a dumb fax machine to dial a normal 10-digit US phone number (no extensions) and send a fax to something that will receive the fax & forward it to us via email in an OCR-able format. Getting email reports of failed incoming faxes is necessary too.

C) We have a reasonable expectation of privacy of our faxes’ content. i.e. Not a Google datamining operation.

I can search the 'net as well as the net guy/gal, but I’m looking for personal knowledge: what works, what doesn’t, what’s a PITA about this idea.

Since the OP is looking for recommendations, this is better suited for IMHO than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

This thread, still in GQ, should be of help.

Oops. Thanks.

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Maybe eFax?

Do note that that one “free no ads” recommendation in the other thread isn’t quite what it seems. There’s still a requirement to put their logo on the cover page, and it is very likely they don’t have a cell in your area–they have to have a local number so it won’t cost them money. And the local numbers are from volunteers.

Sending and receiving your faxes as PDF email attachments is the only way to go; fax machines are ancient technology. I currently use greenfax. Never had a problem.