Virtual Faxing Services

Virtual fax companies will provide you with a virtual (of course :)) number within your area code, which serve as your fax number. You may give this number to anyone wishing to send you fax - to them it will look just like a regular direct number with a fax-machine behind it. The faxes sent to this number will be forwarded to an email of your choice, usually in the form of a PDF or TIF attachment.

There's three levels of services that eFax provides: eFax Free, eFax Plus and eFax Pro.

The free service is really just a trial/demo version of their paid services - you are only allowed to receive faxes and no more than 20 pages per month. If you are sent more than 20 pages in any month then your account is "suspended". Since it was not very clear what exactly "suspended" means, we contacted their pre-sales team and they explained that your account will be, basically, permanently disabled unless you choose to upgrade it to one of their paid services. In other words you won't be able to register for another eFax Free service with the same personal info that you provided for the previous (suspended) account. Fair enough as far as we're concerned - after all the purpose of this plan is to give a potential customer an opportunity to evaluate their services. Of course if you want to be el-cheapo (and if you don't need to send any faxes, just receive) you can always go and register again with a different email. Not that we recommend such "business practices" :). And besides both paid services come with a 30-day free trial offer. The only cost to such trial is a an activation fee (around 12 dollars at the time of writing of this article). We did give eFax a try (we tried the eFax Pro sevice) and at the end of the trial period our money was refunded without any problems on their end (even though that we actually requested the refund 1 day past their deadline).

The difference between eFax Plus and eFax Pro (Pro being the higher-end service) is that with the Pro you may receive more pages per month (200 vs. 130 for the Plus service) as well voice messages. The voice messages are also sent to your email as attachments (Waveform audio files a.k.a. .wav files). The messages may be up to 3 minutes in length which is more then reasonable, especially, considering that .wav files may get pretty bulky due to the fact that .wav files usually do no utilize any compression techniques.

www.efax.com