Faxes To/From BlackBerry Or Any Email

This was originally posted in a thread, but there are many people who are figuring this out, so I have reposted this as a separate thread. It's more like "3rd party service with optional software". Most useful to self employed people, home office workers, and small companies that want minimal premises, etc.

There are tons of email-to-fax and fax-to-email services; You can even get a fax number with some of these services (so you don't have to have a fax machine on your premises) and you automatically get emailed a TIFF document or a PDF document or even a .DOC attachment as an attachment by email, CC'd to both your desktop and Blackberry. And keeps a copy of the fax on a fax webmail site. Some of these are viewable on the Blackberry itself, or if the attachment is not viewable on the Blackberry, it at least serves as a notification for you to login to the fax webmail service or to your desktop computer.

And many of these services allows you to send outgoing faxes simply by sending an email to a special email address, such as:And this works too:The phone number in the subject is automatically dialed.
Your email address is registered with the service, so they know it's you and caller-ID is automatically filled with your virtual fax phone number.
The attached .doc and the email body is automatically transmitted as a fax.
The transmittal pages are automatically added for you.
No software to download.
No software to install.
All allow you to send/receive faxes from any Internet connected computer.
No physical line or fax machine needed.
For incoming faxes, they are emailed to you as attachments.
You are billed to your fax account a specific charge.
There's dozens of services like this, just google 'Email Fax'. (example: www.efax.com)

Just find some easy-to-use service, there's dozens of services out there, and many of them don't even require any software at all! Don't bother with installing software, I prefer the ones that allows you to email attachments to (many accepts almost any format of attachments, automatically converting them to faxes). Many of them actually cheaper than paying for a fax phone line too -- and you get a dedicated fax phone number too in any area code, as if you had a fax machine there with no need for PIN's, etc.

The only time you really want to install software is simply if you want to convert fax image files into text files. (free OCR software included with some fax services). Other times, some fax services offer a special printer driver so you can print the document to a fax which automatically gets emailed to the service for the actual transmission. (This works with scanners too for those times you want to fax hardcopies over an email-to-fax service -- you press the "Print" button on the scanner and select the special printer driver). Works best with scanners that have a built-in document feeder so you can send multiple-page faxes just as easily as a real fax machine. A scanner is ONLY needed if you ever need to send hardcopies as faxes to a fax-to-email service.

Hope this helps explain to you exacxtly how email-to-fax services work. They are convenient when you need fax capability without a fax machine!