BY DARA BLOOM
Editor, TMCnet™

Just The Free Fax Facts

It is virtually impossible these days to purchase a modem that is voice only, without fax capability. Outbound faxing direct from your PC couldn't be easier: Print to fax and you're done.

But how many faxes have you received via fax software on your laptop? If the number is greater than zero, you understand the inhumanity of it. Without a second dedicated line for networking, it's truly a juggling feat to agree to receive a fax via telephone, and then scramble to set your PC to receive mode. You twiddle your thumbs while waiting for the phone ring. Then you stop twiddling so you can cross your fingers and hope the incoming call is indeed the anticipated fax, and not some poor soul who'll get an evil electronic shriek when they connect to your fax software, not your phone.

Hot on the heels of free, Web-based e-mail comes free fax-to-e-mail services. Free fax-to-e-mail services combine the ease of faxing from a computer or stand-alone machine with the simplicity of receiving e-mail. Regardless of your physical location, faxes sent to your phone number are delivered to wherever you check your e-mail. You receive faxes in your e-mail inbox without a dedicated phone line for networking, or a fax machine.

Here's how it works: You're traveling on business, and your assistant back in the home office needs to fax you a Purchase Order, which is handwritten on paper, for approval. The assistant faxes the paper to your personal fax number using a stand-alone fax machine over the PSTN -- this is a regular long-distance phone call. The fax service provider receives the PO electronically on their server, and matches the personal fax number dialed to your e-mail address. It then packages the electronic fax as a graphic file, attaches it to an e-mail, and sends it out to your address. You can receive the fax anywhere you can retrieve your e-mail: in the airport, hotel, at home, wherever. You review the document, and e-mail it back to your assistant with a message saying it's approved. The whole process takes under 10 minutes.

As a telecommuter and business traveler, I was intrigued by these services: I registered for accounts with the two prominent fax-to-e-mail players today: eFax and FaxWave.

eFax.com's eFax Service
eFax.com is no newcomer to the fax industry -- the company formerly know as JetFax, Inc. has been a provider of fax technology for about 10 years. In just seven weeks of offering the fax-to-e-mail service, eFax racked up 200,000 subscribers.

eFax purchases banks of numbers from CLECs in one area code at a time. My personal eFax number is in the 617 area code, which is in the Boston area (great for me, since most of the people faxing me are on the East Coast). However, your number could come from anywhere in the U.S. depending on the block of numbers the company is currently working off of. This basic service (receiving faxes via e-mail) is free, and eFax may be adding service upgrades (such as purchasing an 800 number instead of a randomly assigned long-distance number) in the future. Janice V. Kapner, eFax's director of marketing and communications, noted that "The top two markets that seem to use our service, love our service, and want more features within our service are mobile professionals (40 million in the U.S. alone) and SOHO users who do not want to install a second phone line or purchase a fax machine."

It literally took me under a minute to fill out eFax's registration form, and I received confirmation immediately. My registration confirmation e-mail was quickly followed by an e-mail that contained the eFax Microviewer, the company's Windows-based proprietary fax viewer. The Microviewer .exe file is only 186 KB, and just double-clicking on the icon from the e-mail installs the application.

The Microviewer is one place eFax plans to make their money. A splash screen with an advertisement comes up every time you use the Microviewer, and you have to click through the screen in order to view your fax. The ads don't appear on the fax itself. A proprietary file type (.efx) allows eFax to provide its own blend of compression and encryption. (Users with operating systems other than Windows will receive the attachments as TIFFs, which aren't compressed or encrypted.)

I created a one-page fax -- a mixture of text and a color graphic -- as a trial. Sending the fax from my PC, I was able to connect up to my personal fax number at 14,400 baud. I received my fax via e-mail (with a 23 KB .efx attachment) a few minutes later. The Microviewer worked without a hitch, and the quality of the fax was excellent.

CallWave's FaxWave Service
CallWave's FaxWave service competes with eFax. Your personal fax number will come from northern California (the 209 are code), and you have a choice of three fax numbers offered to you at sign up (pick the one that will be easiest to remember). Like eFax, CallWave plans to introduce premium pay services 800 and local fax numbers.

Registration took minutes, and I received a confirmation e-mail in the same amount of time. Since the basic FaxWave service is free, CallWave turns a profit through advertising -- and they say so right on their Web site. In fact, CallWave has the most honest, plain English privacy policy I've read on the Web. It made me quite confident that my personal data wouldn't be sold to hundreds of different mailing lists. Instead, aggregated demographic data is used to profile subscribers for advertisers. To keep your free service, CallWave asks you to fill out a quick questionnaire once a year.

I sent the same trial fax from my PC, and I connected up with my personal fax number at 9,600 baud. Within a couple of minutes of sending the fax, it appeared in my e-mail inbox. The FaxWave service uses .xif (eXtended Image Format) files to carry the fax -- this format is an extension of the standard Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) and works with pretty much any imaging software (there's no proprietary viewer involved, as there is with eFax). The .xif attachment was 43 KB, and opened with a simple double-click using Imaging for Windows software that was already installed on my PC. The quality of the fax was excellent -- easily as good as you'd get using a traditional stand-alone to stand-alone fax over PSTN, and at least as good as the enterprise-wide LAN fax programs I've used.

Dave Hofstatter, CallWave's executive vice president, points out that one benefit of using .xif means you can easily forward the e-mail and attachment to any platform. "Our .xif file format is the native Windows file extension for viewing and forwarding, or annotating and embedding faxes on the Windows PC. Furthermore, the TIFF-F image format is the cross-platform standard, so a single fax can be forwarded and viewed using different applications on Mac, PC, and UNIX desktops."

Want to comment on this column? You can fax me at 209-396-9175 or 617-507-0542. Whichever fax-to-e-mail provider you choose, one thing is certain: there is such a thing as a free fax.

Dara Bloom welcomes your comments at dbloom@tmcnet.com.