Send and Receive Faxes, No Fees Involved

Recently I needed to send a fax. I gave up my virtual fax number a couple of years ago. Fortunately, I found a couple of free faxing services. So ditch the fax machine and the trips to Kinko’s, and use free-to-try online services such as OCR Solution and FaxZero.

OCR Solution (formerly Qipit) lets you send up to five faxes each week for free. You can upload JPEG images or even send them directly from a camera phone. Free faxes include a header banner that mentions the company.

FaxZero limits you to two faxes of three pages each day, and its transmissions include a FaxZero-branded coversheet. But instead of sending images, FaxZero takes PDFs and Word documents, making it a better choice for PC-based use.

You can even cancel your dedicated incoming fax line and have people send physical faxes to you online. eFax Free handles everything, digitizing faxes and routing them to your email account. You get a free phone number that is connected to eFax and is always listening for incoming calls.

eFax Free has a few limitations, however. You don’t get to pick an area code for the incoming number, and you can’t receive more than 100 pages each month. Plus, you have to read faxes in an eFax application, in its proprietary .efx format. (Paying subscribers can select an area code, receive more faxes, and read them as PDFs.) But for moderate use, eFax Free works well. Try one of these services out and let me know how it goes.