Question

What (preferably free) services are there to send and/or receive faxes, and which one(s) do you recommend? (besides a fax modem)

Answer 1

I have not tried it yet but gotfreefax says it is ad free on the fax pages. (sending only)

• Truly FREE!
• No-Ad free fax cover page
• 3 pages per fax maximum
• 2 free faxes per day maximum

Answer 2

I doubt you will find 100% free as unlike email or complete digital services, faxing requires sending over a telephone line which will cost someone, somewhere.

When my mum went to America and I needed to send something urgently, I found Fax Zero which basically lets you send PDFs and attaches adverts to the start and finish - however, it does not affect the message and it works well.

I also found Free Fax which looks similar but can send internationally, I have no experience with them and cannot rate them.

Answer 3

eFax will give you a free (ad-sponsored) inbound fax number. Like the other services, they will forward the fax to you as an e-mail. The only gotcha to receiving free faxes is that you have to also consent to receiving eFax's occasional e-mails advertising third-party products.

Unfortunately, you have to pay a monthly fee in order to send faxes. It's cheaper than having a dedicated fax line, but if you don't send very many faxes, then it probably isn't worth it.

One thing that has concerned me about online faxing is that fax-to-email services don't encrypt the faxes (at least, the ones I've looked into didn't have that option at the time), and I doubt they encrypt the transmission itself. Faxes often contain highly confidential or personal information, and even though most phone networks are now packet-switched networks, it still seems like a landline-to-landline fax transmission (i.e., no unencrypted VOIP or e-mail involved) is less likely to be intercepted or snooped. I wouldn't use an online fax service for anything that seems too sensitive to send unencrypted via e-mail.

Answer 4

I'm sending faxes via freeFAX, an ad-sponsored free online fax sending service.

I'm using Faxaway to receive faxes (sign-up is free, you only pay for sending). You'll get a real fax number that you can give to anyone who wants to send a fax to you. When that fax number receives an inbound fax, Faxaway answers the call, saves the fax as a TIF image, and forwards it on to your email address.