Send and Receive Faxes By Email
Need the ability to send and receive faxes for your small business?
A fax machine, an extra phone line, and paper expenses can add up quickly.
Consider using a service that will let you send and receive faxes via email. Typically, PDF’s are used to both send and receive faxes. The great advantage of this kind of service is being able to send and receive a fax anywhere where there is web access.
There are several services out there. The biggest factor of course is price.
The cheapest deal I was able to find was provided by MaxEmail.
MaxEmail offer two kinds of service Lite and Plus. The Lite service is what I will discuss here.
MaxEmail offers a 30 day free trial which allows users to receive up to 50 faxes/voicemails and send up to three faxes. Surprisingly, several other services do not offer a trial version. It is important for any service offered over the web to provide a free trial. Credit goes to MaxEmail.
MaxEmail Lite provides a non-local telephone number (815 area code) that is used as the fax number. The service allows users to receive up to 500 faxes and/or voicemails a month. Other services do not provide the ability to handle voicemail.
What does it cost?
- Setup fee $10
- Annual fee $24
- Inbound Faxes/Voicemails – first 500 included, over 500 each page/voicemail received is $0.05.
- Sending Faxes – $0.05/30 seconds of transmission time. A two page fax will cost around $0.10.
- Basic initial year cost: $35
- Basic initial year cost plus sending 100 two page faxes: $45
I compared this service with a comparable service of a provider that is well advertised. They did not offer a trial version per se. They had a free version, but this does not allow the user to send any faxes. Their comparable “lite” service has the advantage of letting users to select a local telephone number. However, that comes at a price. The cost is $13/month, with a $13 setup fee. Sending faxes costs $0.10/page, and the account can recieve only 130 pages per month.
- Basic initial year cost: $169
- Basic initial year cost plus sending 100 two page faxes: $189
The cost difference is substantial. You will have to ask yourself several questions. Do you need a local number? Will local companies be faxing you or will out of state companies be faxing you? How many faxes will you receive versus how many will you send?
MaxEmail also offers a Plus service which includes a local phone number. The annual fee is $84. Still much less than competitors.
For testing the fax to email waters, MaxEmail Lite is the place to start. With the few faxes I have sent and received so far, it has worked great.
For other fax services take a look at Top Ten Reviews.
[tags]maxemail, email, fax[/tags]
Posted by Paul Flyer on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 in Utilities
