 Free
Fax |
| Really. It is NOT the 1st. of April.
You can send a fax for free (apart from the cost of connecting to
the Internet that you are paying now). This
is ideal if you have free or cheap access to the Internet and want to contact
someone who has fax but not e-mail (and lives an expensive telephone call
away in an area that is
covered by the service).
My ISP Demon Internet and The
Phone Company TPC provide this service free (Q: what's in it for them?
A: they get a fax number and an e-mail address and an ISP local to the
delivery point adds an advert to the fax cover page). Free Fax works
by sending your message via the Internet to a local gateway where they
then only have to pay the price of a local call. It costs you nothing
more than your Internet connection charge. As far as I can tell (and
I've used it extensively) you can use it even if you don't subscribe to
Demon (but they are not advertising that fact very widely, and you can't
use their fax to e-mail system Dfax)
You can send a fax from e-mail by sending an e-mail to remote-printer.name@faxnumber.iddd.tpc.int (e.g. if you use remote-printer.Stephen@448700561171.iddd.tpc.int as an e-mail address this sends a fax to me straight from your e-mail). The main disadvantage is that you cannot use attachments to send images etc. (without first getting some additional software). It's hardly worth faxing me like this when you can use e-mail but you can fax anyone within the areas covered, even when they don't have e-mail. There is also a very very
simple version to send an ASCII-only fax using a form in a web page here:
if you wanted to send a fax all you need to know is the intended recipient's
name and their iddd fax number (which includes international dialing code,
e.g. for me it is 448700561171) and have a subject and some text in mind,
and you also need to give an e-mail address for the confirmation that the
fax was received. Note that in this method you do not get a copy of what
you send (so save or print a copy of the web page after you have prepared
it, but before you send it). And do not use a tab in that page.
The outgoing service does not cover the entire world (but
does cover the entire UK) - see coverage
at this page. There are also other such services (mostly
NOT free) and the excellent Internet
Fax services review site of Michael Frost or Kevin
Savetz's FAQ How can I send a fax from the Internet might help you
further.
Good Luck. |
