On-Line Fax With EFax
eFax is an Internet fax service provider, which allows you to send and receive faxes by email, eliminating the costs associated with a separate phone line, fax machine and fax supplies. eFax is currently one of the largest Internet fax service providers, offering their services to over 9 millions members worldwide.
When you are using eFax, it does not mean that your recipient or sender has to also be an eFax member. You can send and receive faxes from anyone, even if they are not eFax subscribers.
There are about a dozen of reputable Internet fax service providers, which come with varying features and fees. We believe that eFax is one of the leading service providers in their field, due to the following key features: eFax offers one of the widest arrays of phone number selections; it is easy to send or receive your faxes and voice mails by email, using this service; eFax has a fast and reliable communications network.
“I used to use [...] before, and it was horrible. I remember when I sent a fax for a job interview, and then I found out that it was not delivered. I was shocked… Then I switched to eFax. I have been using eFax for over a year now, and it’s never let me down.”
Excerpt from Yahoo Answers
Wide Phone Number Selections
In comparison to other similar service providers, eFax offers one of the widest phone number selections, helping you select the phone number that’s best for you. Members are presented with a choice of phone numbers in around 2,000 cities across the globe, as well as toll-free phone numbers in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France and Spain.
Easy Way to Send/Receive Faxes and Voice Mails by Email
When testing eFax, it was easy for us to send and receive several test faxes and voice mails. The received faxes and voice mails arrived as email attachments. This means that you can use the service anywhere where you can access your regular email. We have also tested sending a fax to a fax machine, and it arrived as a regular paper fax.
In order to send a fax, you need to attach a file on your computer to an email and address your email to the fax number of the recipient (it looks like a regular fax number with a special prefix at the end of it). In order to fax a paper document, you would first need to scan the document and save it to your computer. Next, you would attach it as a regular file to your email and send your fax.
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Fast and Reliable Communications Network
- eFax states that their servers provide 99.5% uptime, 2-5 minutes delivery times and a sound transmission security. We decided to test it to see the results for ourselves.
- All of our test faxes were delivered within 2-3 minutes, and none of them failed, proving that eFax communication network is one of the fastest and most reliable in its field.
- When we tested other Internet fax services, most of our faxes took 10 minutes to be delivered on the average, with a few faxes actually failing to be delivered at all.
- Furthermore, the eFax communication network is protected by firewall, security and redundancy technologies.
Customer Support
After not being able to locate an answer to one of our questions in the FAQ section of the eFax website, we decided that it was a good time to test their customer support. We contacted their customer support by email (the second option was a phone), and we got an answer to our question within a couple of hours. eFax states that your questions will be resolved even faster by phone.
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“The system was easy to sign up for and start using. I’m happy with the prices and the service. What else can you ask from an Internet fax?”
Excerpt from faxbeep.com forum
eFax vs. Regular Fax Machine
There are certain things which you get with either one – eFax Internet fax service or a regular fax machine. For instance, in both cases you get your private local fax number or a toll-free number. Thus, in both cases you can choose an appropriate fax number for your needs, according to where you live or work. When signing up for eFax, you would need to choose your preferred location for receiving your local fax number, or simply choose a toll-free fax number.
The number that you get with eFax is no different than a regular fax number – you get a real number that is tied to your e-mail. Your fax number looks and acts just like any regular fax number. When someone faxes you, the incoming fax is simply converted to a file and sent to your email as an attachment. When someone receives a fax from you in their fax machine, it arrives as a regular paper fax.
However, there are a number of additional features, which you get with the eFax service and not with a regular fax machine. For example, a fax machine ties you to a particular physical location to send and receive your faxes. With eFax you can send and receive faxes anywhere you can access your email.
Next, eFax allows you to receive 130 fax pages for free each month (not applicable if you have a toll-free number). If you are a heavy fax user, this might not cover all of your monthly fax needs. However, if you are a regular fax user 130 free fax pages per month are usually more than enough.
Unlike common fax machines, eFax supports more file formats, including PDF, TIFF and EFX. Thus, you can receive or send your faxes in any of these 3 file formats. While the first two file formats can be opened on any computer, the third one will require you to download special eFax Messenger software (free). eFax Messenger software will also allow you to convert an EFX (.efx) file to other file formats, such as TIFF (.tif), PDF (.pdf) or JPEG (.jpg).
With regular faxes, you are limited with one fax receiver. In contrast to regular faxes, when using eFax, you can send your faxes to up to 5 email accounts, which eliminates the need of sending your fax over and over again.
Another advantage of the eFax system is that you can use it with your cell phone or a PDA, allowing you to send and receive your fax pages anywhere there is a wireless Internet connection.
Furthermore, it’s great to be able to save your faxes as you would save a regular email attachment, for your future use. Additionally, eFax will store your faxes for 1 year, so that you can access your files when you are not at your office or your home computer. We believe this to be a valuable feature for improving your faxing capabilities.
Above all, faxing with eFax is a good way to save money on the expenses required for a separate fax line, fax supplies (ink, paper, cartridges, etc.) and the fax machine itself.
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Costs
First of all, in order to evaluate eFax we advise you to take advantage of their free 30-day trial.
If you decide to go with their services, you would have to pay a fee of $12.95 per month (at the time of this review).
Unless you have a toll-free number, you would be able to receive up to 130 pages of faxes per month for free. If you have a toll-free number, you would have to pay $0.20 for each incoming page, with no free pages.
Rates of sending faxes vary by country, but we found the prices of this service to be fairly competitive. For example, sending a fax in the United States or United Kingdom would cost you $0.10 per fax page.
Rates of sending a fax apply to pages that would take less than 1 minute to transmit. Generally, most of the fax pages fall particularly into this category, and such faxes are billed on a per-page basis. However, faxes that take longer than 1 minute to transmit are billed on a per-minute basis.
Disadvantages
- We have come across some complaints that eFax does not always work with the Firefox browser. Even though we did not experience any difficulties while testing it in Firefox, you may want to test eFax in Firefox at the time of your free trial.
- Another disadvantage is that the fees for sending faxes are somewhat higher than the fees of some other Internet fax service providers. However, the speed and reliability of this service make a small extra cost well worth it. When testing several of the cheaper Internet fax service providers, we have encountered much slower speeds with many of the cheaper services, while some even failed to deliver a few of our test faxes, which was a grave disadvantage for us. eFax was somewhat more expensive, but all of our test faxes were delivered within 2-3 minutes, and what’s more important – none of them failed.
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“Fax machines are so 90’s! I think it’s great to send faxes from your email! It supports many formats and works like a charm.”
Excerpt from Youtube user comments
Conclusion
Here are the important points:
- We believe that eFax is currently one of the leading Internet fax service providers. The Main features that place eFax above its competitors are its reliability and high delivery speed, wide range of available fax numbers and the ease of use.
- eFax is naturally more comfortable and affordable than a regular fax machine, helping you save money and allowing you to send and receive faxes anywhere where you can access your email.
- Overall, we would recommend eFax to anyone who is looking into starting to use their email for their faxing purposes.