Green technologies are on the rise. Indeed, if we want to save our planet, “Green” habits have to be adopted everywhere, from technology to everyday life. Saving on paper and ink resources is a huge step towards cost savings for any company, but also is a huge improvement for the environment.

There are several internet fax service providers in the communication technology market that allow you to send and receive electronic faxes through the internet mainly by using your email. Basically the eFax provider that you sign up with will assign you a real fax number which will be associated with your email address. All fax communication is taken care by the eFax provider.

Some of the advantages of using an electronic fax service compared with the traditional fax machine are the following:

• Environmental friendly: Reducing consumption of fax paper, toner, and ink cartridges not only reduces costs, it’s also the best thing to do for the environment. Printing every fax page on paper creates trash and costs money.
• Increases Productivity – Reduces Time: Do everything from your Computer. Just attach the electronic document you want to send on an email and off you go. Also, received faxes can be viewed from anywhere you have email access, even from your PDA or Blackberry phone.
• Better Reliability: Forget the old fax machine that was hanging up on your phone line, or the busy tones. Sending faxes in email communication is more reliable than ever.
• Reduced Cost: Basically the monthly fee you pay to your efax service provider is less than the cost of a dedicated phone line and for the long distance calls when sending a fax. Plus you don’t have to worry about the maintenance costs of a dedicated hardware fax machine (paper, toner, fault maintenance etc).

How it Works

RECEIVING FAXES

When someone sends you a Fax (with a normal Fax machine using a telephone line), the eFax provider’s server receives the Fax on your behalf and converts it into an electronic document (PDF, TIFF etc). The eFax provider can also store the FAX on their server for backup. After the FAX is converted to a digital document, it is send as an attachment to your email.

SENDING FAXES

To send an electronic fax, just attach the document you want to send (e.g Word Document, scanned hardcopy image etc) to an email message, and send it to the destination fax number with the following email format: <destination-fax-number>@<efax-provider-domain>.com

For example, if the destination fax number is 123456789 and you are using efax provider, then send your email to [email protected]

I don’t usually take a positive or negative position on any product on this blog, but I really wanted to give you my opinion for the best internet fax service provider in the market. This is eFAX.com. This company is the best electronic fax service provider… PERIOD. I am using efax.com for two years now and they managed to create a very loyal and happy customer. Just search on the web and you will notice that eFAX.com is the most popular and one of the biggest efax services around. It is not a coincidence that they are so popular. Their excellent features, wide support for email clients, extensive worldwide digital fax network coverage (fax number in over 2500 cities in 27 countries) and with more than 11 million subscribers, eFAX.com is the ideal solution for any type of internet fax needs.