By Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.TV
RVers use the Internet for everything else, why not faxing? Even if you do travel with an all-in-one printer/fax machine, most of them will need a cable from a landline telephone in order to work. There are websites that you can use for faxing.
Receiving is easy. All that’s required is a phone number that receives the faxed document and redirects it as an attachment to an email. We’ve used eFax.com for many years and have had no problem with our grand total of about three faxes per year! Here’s how it works: You sign up for a free account; you will be assigned a fax number; now you can give that number when anyone wants to send you a fax. To them it’s just like sending to any other regular old fax number, but to you it looks like an attachment to an email.
Is it really Free? If you go to eFax.com you will see eFax Plus for $16.95/mo. and eFax Pro for 19.95/mo. There is a free version, honest! You need to browse to www.efax.com/efax-free in order to sign up. With the free version you can’t choose your phone number, and you’re limited to receiving no more than ten faxes per month. You can’t send faxes with eFax-free.
When I need it, I use a different free service: FaxZero.com. To use the free fax-sending service of FaxZero, you don’t even need to sign up for an account! You just fill out the form with the name and the email of the sender (you) and the name and fax number of the receiver. You can then type a note for the cover sheet and upload a document to be sent. FaxZero will send an email to the address given for the sender. When you see that email and click the confirmation, your fax will be sent. You will receive another email to confirm that the fax was sent successfully. The free FaxZero is limited to faxes of no more than three pages plus cover, and no more than five faxes per day.
If the document you need to fax is a physical piece of paper, then we have another step. If you have a printer/scanner, then you’re all set. Just scan the paper — now you have a document on your computer that you can upload and fax with FaxZero. Don’t have a scanner? In a pinch, I take a photo of the document, but FaxZero specifies that the uploaded file must be a .doc, .docx, or .pdf. I open up my word processing program and choose Insert Picture, specifying the picture of the paper I just took. Now I have a document file! I might even use Word’s ability to Save As a .pdf file to make it smaller and more efficient.
