Even if you don't have a fax machine, you can still receive faxes via the Internet! There are many free and low cost services that you can use to receive or send faxes from your computer. In a nutshell, these services provide you with your own unique fax number (usually an out of town number), and all you need to do is supply your email address. Their computers will then accept and email your faxes to you, instead of printing them out, usually in the Adobe PDF format. Now you can print out your faxes just as if you had received them, or just keep them on your computer, which reduces the amount of paperwork you have to deal with. There are numerous companies that offer these types of services. Some of these services are even free services, but impose restrictions like only 200 pages or minutes of faxing in a 30 day period. Another limitation is that the free services will only allow you to send or receive faxes, not both. Of course you can always sign up for two different free services to get around this problem.

Here are some freebies: http://faxzero.com  <-- free sending http://www.faxdigits.com  <-- free receipts http://www.j2.com  <-- free receipts http://www.efax.com  <-- free receipts For more information about these and other services (along with user reviews), we found this website to be very helpful: http://www.savetz.com/fax

Other solutions: If your computer has a modem, you can receive and send faxes in this manner as well, though this is a bit more complicated and requires an analog phone line. There are also more expensive commercial Voice-Over-IP (read: internet phone) solutions, which will handle incoming faxes and then email and route them appropriately. Again though, these require an analog phone line to be used, further adding to your costs. © Christine Karpinski 2006

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