Green Life Guide: Save Paper and Use an Online Fax Service
There are a number of areas at home and at work that we can make small changes to Go Green and help make the Earth a better place. One of those is identifying ways to save on our consumable usage such as paper. Many of us send faxes from home and at work. By making use of online fax services, we can prevent printing the document we intend to fax and instead upload to an online fax service to send the fax. Most of the major online fax services have limited free services so you can try it out before choosing a monthly or per fax fee service. The following is a summary of some of the top online fax services to consider using to live a little greener at work or at home.
Online Fax Services
#1 Online Fax Service – PopFax
PopFax is free to use for the first month and then shifts to a $5.49 monthly service charge. When you use PopFax, they provide a local fax number and let you send and receive faxes through their online fax service. They will also keep your documents that are uploaded to the service stored for up to 30 days in the event you desire to reuse them on other faxes.
#2 Online Fax Service – GotFreeFax
GotFreeFax is a free online fax service that lets you send up to two faxes a day of maximum length of 3 pages a fax. You can upload PDF files, doc or docx documents, and images to use with the service. After the fax is delivered, an email response is provided to you if using the free service. You can alternatively choose to pay $1.99 per fax if you don’t have a recurring need to send and receive faxes online.
#3 Online Fax Service – MyFax
MyFax is one of the fastest growing online fax services on the Internet. Their service is tailored to home users and all sizes of businesses. Unlike some of the other services, MyFax lets you send and receive faxes through your email so you save money on both ends of fax usage. They offer a 30 day free trial, let you keep your existing fax number to use with the service, and offer tiered packages of use for a flat monthly fee depending on your individual or company needs.
Online Fax Service Tips
Some tips to consider when using an online fax service are:
- Try to use Arial or Verdana font faces with a size 12 or larger to display better on the fax.
- Always use a cover page since you don’t know how many incoming faxes are received on the other end of the fax.
- Faxes transmit at a 200 DPI resolution where your printer will normally print at 600 DPI or greater.
- If you are scanning documents to fax, choose black and white, halftone to make them more compatible with the fax format.
- Portrait layouts on documents tend to fax better than non-standard layouts.