Switching to MyFax (from eFax)

One day faxes will become obsolete, but for now it's hard not to have a fax number because some people insist on sending you faxes.  And some people insist on being sent documents by fax.  Even though faxes haven't become obsolete I regard fax machines as such.

A fax machine can only be in one physical location, which means to send or receive faxes you have to go to that location.  And if the machine runs out of paper then you won't be getting that important fax, will you? Same thing if the power goes out.  The solution is to get an online fax service.

For years I've used eFax.com.  I have a local number so people have the sense that they are sending the fax to a location in New Orleans (which for some reason seems to make people feel better).  In reality the faxes go to some secure location that has high-speed reliable internet access.  The faxes are captured as images and then sent to me by email.   Sending faxes is the same process in reverse: I upload or email the document to eFax and they send it to the recipient's fax machine (or fax service).

I like eFax, but it's kind of pricey.  The basic account is $16/month for 30 pages of sent faxes and 130 of received faxes.  I don't think I've ever exceeded the minimums, but if you do it's an extra .10 or .15 cents per page, depending on if you are sending or receiving.

A friend of mine uses Myfax.com and, after checking it out I have to say that I'm impressed.  It has all the same features as eFax, but at a lower cost: $10/month for 100 sent pages and 200 received.  Also, when you receive a fax by email from MyFax there is a link to click if you want the fax to be flagged as a junk fax.  

Nice.

Comments

[S W]

Were you able to keep the same fax number or did you have to switch it? Keep up the great blogs!

[Ernie the Attorney]

No, I'll have to switch numbers. But that's not a big deal since I don't really receive a lot of faxes and when I do it's after someone asks me for the number. I do get a fair number of junk faxes so I'll be happy to leave those on the old service.

[Chuck Newton]

My virtual PBX service, Vocalocity, provides this service for free and without unit of page costs for outgoing. I was not able to transfer my number from EFax, however.

[Krystin]

I noticed this on the MyFax website in the Knowledge Base section...

Can I keep my fax number?

Yes. You can call-forward your existing fax number(s) to your new MyFax number or in certain
circumstances, you can have your existing fax number ported to MyFax.

So you might not have to get a new fax number after all!

[Ernie the Attorney]

Hey Krystin:

Thanks! I checked with MyFax (called the toll free number and got a helpful representative right away, which was confidence inspiring!). She said that the 'certain circumstances' under which I could port my eFax number over would be if I had ported the number to eFax initially, which I didn't. Since they assigned the number they control it and won't release it.

Perhaps this violates some law or reg, but I'm not interested in mounting a legal battle so I accept my fate and will have to live with having a new fax number. As I said, it's not a big deal for me because I wasn't having a lot of inbound faxes anyway. So I'll just update my information in the proper places and go forward that way.

[Jeff]

Here is a suggestion . . . tell your current fax number provider (AT&T in my case) that you plan to drop the fax line in order to go with an on-line fax service. AT&T "discovered" that they could lower my monthly bill by nearly $100 per month without any reduction in services. I wish that VOIP was something that I trusted, but Katrina made me devoted to hardlines.

[John]

Not an ad just an alternative consideration. I'm a solo and have used maxemail (www.maxemail.com) for a number of years and even used their service remotely on my Treo to send an extremely large file while on vacation and without my laptop. I especially like the one year fax retention service which I use for backup/audit. I think I'm about $80/year. Good luck with the new service, I always thought efax was a little "lite" for legal professionals.

[Andrew Winters]

I've been using metrofax (metrofax.com) with pretty good results. I can get up to 1,000 pages (combined sent and received) a month for $12.95. Their FAQ says you can keep your fax number but in my case, they do not offer a New Hampshire area code so this was not possible. Very periodically I get people saying the fax was busy, which the metrofax tech support says should not be happening. Other than that, I am very satisfied with the service. One of my favorite things about it, and this is probably true of the others as well, is that, in addition to the reduction in paper, it automatically saves your sent faxes so you have proof positive a fax was successfully sent.

[Steven]

I've tried a couple of VOIP solutions including one with fax. The one that looked promising was Ring Central. We send faxes to certain federal officials. They complained that our faxes were too light to read in many instances. After we lost about three days of voice calls, we dropped Ring Central and went with AT&T lines and an Aastra asterisk device (we were using Aastra phones with the Ring Central service). We even added a Xerox Work Centre 4150X. Previously, I managed a satellite office of a mega firm that used VOIP at the satellite office with calls routed through the home office. It was great when it worked but when it did not our revenues dived. We had an IT guy full time making close to six figures running everything (and this is Oklahoma so figure over $100,000 elsewhere). Using Vonage in your home for a land line in this world of every one having a cell phone is one thing... But, trusting important business communications to soft fax and VOIP to me has not been reliable or a savings whether in a mega firm setting or my own current small boutique practice. I'm always looking to shave overhead. I've not yet personally been involved in a situation where VOIP or soft fax did anything but cost more money than a more traditional way of getting it done.