All the frustration, but without the toner smell

I wanted to start with the most onerous of all business tasks….sending and receiving faxes.

Whether you like it or not, you will be forced to send and receive faxes all the time. You will probably want to respond thusly:

(comic from Achewood which is damn funny so go read it a'ight? )

But sadly you are fighting a force of millions of middle-managers. Should you buy a fax machine and a land line? Probably not. Instead, we suggest using a faxing service!

e-Faxing

Faxing services are some of the oldest companies on the Internet (we remember seeing ads for them on usenet before the www existed). The idea is a company somewhere with a huge PBX handles all the receving and sending. All you have to do is give your newly assigned fax number to customers and whatever they send will be automatically scanned, turned into a PDF/image and emailed to you. Likewise, to send a fax just email a PDF or set of images to a special email address (it has to come from you) and it will be faxed.

Not all services are the same. Some things we suggest watching for:

• You shouldn't be spending more than $25/mo unless you send tons of faxes.
• Avoid ones that require special viewers.
• Some are web based. Some email based. Up to you!
• Some use images, some PDFs. The nice thing about images is that it's trivial to 'copy and paste' a signature when a document needs signing.

So what did we end up with?

We tried eFax and didn't like it because of the cranky viewer.

Next we tried myFax which has an email interface and so far we like it.

If we were going to start from 'scratch' we'd probably also check out hellofax which allows you to edit faxes within a web-browser.