What is Online Faxing? 4 Common Uses

What is Online Faxing?

Online faxing is the replacement for the fax machine. It is a digital tool that enables you to send and receive fax documents over the internet, so no fax machine hardware is needed anymore. All fax communication is handled through an online portal, which can be accessed from mobile phones and computers.

Why Is Online Faxing a Necessity for Your Office?

Today, as everything evolves digitally, traditional fax has started to give way to online fax. Online faxing is a digital tool that lets you send and receive documents via cloud technology. In some places it is also called e-fax or internet fax. It can be used on computers and all smart devices.

What sets online faxing apart from traditional faxing, and the reason it is still used, is that it is more secure than many other ways of transferring information and files. Online faxing uses end-to-end encryption to protect documents from being hacked. This way, users can send and receive documents over a secure line without worrying about hackers. Many companies and individuals prefer it because it is easy and reliable to use, and they consider it a necessity.

How to use Online Faxing?

Traditional faxing required a fax machine and a landline to send a fax. Compared with traditional fax, online faxing does not involve printing or waiting next to a machine. Faxes can be sent and received without any physical device. To use it, you subscribe to an online faxing service that converts faxes into online documents.

Companies that provide this service use converter software so that files sent from both digital systems and traditional fax hardware reach the other party in a format compatible with cloud technology. The service converts your documents into a format that the recipient’s fax machine can read and sends them via an online fax number or email address (e.g. 000000000@onlinefax.com). You can send any document that can be attached to an email, such as Microsoft Word documents, PDF files, and scanned images. Documents can also be exchanged in both directions, from online fax to online fax or from online fax to traditional fax.

Benefits of Online Faxing

Now that we have answered the question “What is online faxing?”, let’s focus on its benefits:

• One of the most obvious benefits of online faxing is convenience. Traditional fax required a machine, which could only send a limited number of documents at a time and was not portable. Online faxing, on the other hand, does not take up any space in the office, and many documents can be sent at the same time from a single source.
• Online faxing is cost-effective. How does online faxing reduce costs? With online faxing, you only pay a subscription fee. With traditional fax, you need to buy a fax machine, and there are recurring costs for supplies such as paper, toner, and ink.
• Another benefit is that it saves time. How does online faxing save time? With traditional fax, people had to go from place to place to find a fax machine, and one wasn’t available to everyone. Online faxing is available to anyone on their own mobile phone or computer, so it is far more accessible.
• Access to a fax machine was not the only issue. Supplies such as toner, ink, and paper had to be stocked. If they ran out, the document might reach the other party incomplete or incorrect, or the fax might not be sent at all. Not needing any supplies is therefore another benefit of online faxing.
• Documents cannot be backed up on a traditional fax machine, and fax machines face many technical problems, such as service interruptions, printing problems, connection problems, paper jams, failures to send or receive files, and overheating. With online fax, on the other hand, all transactions are carried out in the cloud, documents are backed up automatically, and there is no risk of losing them. Even if the internet connection drops during transmission, the document can be recovered thanks to automatic cloud backup. And because it runs in the cloud, online faxing has far fewer problems than traditional fax.

4 Common Uses for Online Faxing Services

What can online faxing do for your company beyond the benefits outlined above?

Sending Confidential Documents that Need a Secure Connection

Technological progress is not purely positive. As technology develops, the threats to information security grow, because new ways of hacking systems keep emerging. Online faxing, however, is built on cloud technology. Companies and individuals prefer it because, unlike email and other ways of sending documents, online faxing uses end-to-end encryption to protect documents from being hacked. This way, users can send and receive documents over a secure line without worrying about hackers.

Online fax is also more secure because traditional fax suffers from problems such as misdialed fax numbers and documents ending up in the wrong hands. When you send an online fax, you can see the recipient’s name directly from the fax code you enter, so you can check that it is going to the right person.

Sending Documents that Are Too Large to Fax

Fax machines have a limited capacity, so you can only send a certain number of pages at a time and have to wait to send the rest in pieces. To increase this capacity, companies or individuals would have to buy more fax machines. In addition, not every type of document can be sent. As communication has become digital, new possibilities have opened up, and online faxing is one of them. With online faxing, the size and footprint of documents have become minimal, and an unlimited number of documents can be sent from a single source. You can send these documents in seconds, without waiting.

Avoiding the High Cost of Regular Fax Service

With traditional fax, companies had to pay separately for the fax machine. Since it was an additional device running on electricity, it also increased utility bills. When the machine broke down, you had to call technical support and pay extra for repairs, and if you wanted to avoid problems, you had to have it serviced regularly.

On top of that, there were many recurring costs, such as paper, ink, and toner. Individuals sending faxes had to pay a separate fee for each document. Since no additional machine is required with online faxing, these recurring costs disappear. Individuals and companies pay only a fixed monthly or annual subscription fee, with no separate charge for each document.

Sending Documents When You’re Away from the Office

With traditional faxing, you used to have to go somewhere with a fax machine, such as a shop or a post office. You also could not send documents on public holidays or outside working hours. With online faxing, you can send any document you want, whenever and wherever you want, because the cloud system lets you send your documents from any computer or mobile device through your subscription.

Conclusion

As technology has developed, traditional fax has evolved into online fax. Online faxing means sending faxes via cloud technology. The reason online faxing is still relevant today is that it is a secure method of transferring information and files, since it uses end-to-end encryption to protect documents from being hacked.

If you want to send an online fax, you need to subscribe to an online faxing service that converts faxes into online documents. The online faxing provider has software that converts your documents into a format that the recipient’s fax machine can read. After converting the file, it sends it via an online fax number or email. It can be used on all computers and smart devices.

If you want to learn more about online faxing, you can read our other blog post about the history of the fax machine.

Resource:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_fax
• https://www.encyclopedia.com/articles/how-to-send-a-fax-from-a-computer/