I selected San Francisco's area code, then picked a number from the options presented. You can choose a local, toll-free, or international fax number. In fact, Efax is the only service we tested to let you pick an international number. Efax generates a four-digit numeric password for you. You'll enter your name and email address, followed by address and billing info, and that's it — you're ready to fax.
Efax lists support for 37 files types, including all the usual suspects and a few we wouldn't expect, such as Quattro Pro or Amiga Interchange File Format.
My guess is, those are holdovers from when Efax launched back in Efax's web interface supports sending up to 10 documents, or up to 18MB total, and the look is fairly simple and pleasing. In fact, it's identical to that of MetroFax — not surprising given that they have the same owner in J2 Global. Like MetroFax, Efax lets you tag and search faxes, and it supports up to five email address for use with a given fax account.
Here, you can select multiple files to send, add addressees, and then send your fax. The biggest difference between Efax and MetroFax is that Efax sports a big link at bottom for sending large files via another J2-owned service, FuseMail. FuseMail is now fully integrated into the Efax service, though. Enter your name, the destination email, subject and message text; then, simply attach up to 3GB of files. You can even get a notification when the file is downloaded.
Hit send, and your file s are off to the recipient, accessible via a FuseMail document link automatically expiring days later. Efax has another feature that sets it apart: It has an option, buried in its settings, to send faxes using a secure SSL encrypted container. To enable this feature, you have to contact Efax first. For Mac users, eFax capabilities are considerably reduced.
Without access to eFax Messenger Mac users will not be able to customize their cover page or preview a fax. Over the years, many consumers have complained about difficulty cancelling service. You cannot cancel your eFax service through their website. You have to either cancel through a special live chat link or after-hours via phone. Furthermore, they state that your account is not officially cancelled until you have received written confirmation from Customer Service. There are numerous complaints online from people who thought they cancelled their account, but continued being billed.
The practice of requiring people to cancel online services via phone rather than online is actually becoming more common practice. The other issue relates to number porting. If you port a number you already have into eFax, you will be able to port that number out when you cancel the service. However, if you received your number from eFax and want to port that number out at some point, you will not be able to.
This is actually pretty common amongst online fax providers, because they are not governed by the number portability laws that apply to traditional phone service providers. This is an ideal fit for companies with hundreds of employees who need custom implementation, high security and a scalable system. Each customer is given their own price quote based on estimated volume.
This service is a no monthly fee service designed to let companies send out one-time or periodic fax blasts to a large number of recipients. Pricing for this service can be found here , but you will need to either call or email a j2 representative to sign up.
Interested in a solution that manages your phone and fax needs? Simplify your communications with RingCentral Office. RingCentral Office offers a feature rich, business class VoIP phone system for far less than the cost of a traditional phone system. Established Over , customer served. Reviewed Plan Many e fax services offer multiple plans. This line notes the name of the plan that we reviewed, which is the plan most similar to our market standard plan as defined below.
Monthly Fees All of the reviewed companies charge a monthly fee for their services. Some offer discounts for making an upfront annual payment. Annual Payment Discount Some companies offer a price discount when paid annually instead of monthly. The following cells show the monthly equivalent of the annual payment, for information on the total annual amount scroll over the monthly equivalent cell. We read all the fine print for you. Start Up Fee Some companies charge a one time start up fee when you get started.
Free Trial Period Many e fax service providers offer a free trial period. These include:. For this update, we researched 11 online fax services and tested seven of them based on the above criteria. We previously recommended HelloFax for professional faxing because of its cloud-storage integration and its competitive pricing for both sending and receiving faxes.
After our latest round of testing, we recommend it as the best option for anyone who needs to send a fax for free or for a low, one-time fee. This service is more reliable and sent higher-quality faxes than our previous top pick for free faxing, FaxZero. With HelloFax, you can securely send up to five pages for free just by signing up.
And your account offers you convenient features, such as quickly faxing to previously entered fax numbers, if you have to send a fax more than once in your lifetime. The price is just right for people who need to send a fax only occasionally.
In addition to the five free fax pages you get to send when you sign up, you can get up to 20 more to send by doing things like sharing the HelloFax website on Facebook or Twitter five free pages each or referring others to the service five free pages for each person who signs up.
In addition to giving you the ability to receive faxes, a paid plan gives you access to more-advanced features, like extra account users up to four more , the option to send faxes by email, and multi-recipient faxing. The cover-page option is minimal—it includes only the to, from, and message fields in one basic design—but it does the job. In all of our tests, the faxes sent with HelloFax were crisp, with excellent contrast, regardless of file type. Even small, 6-point text was easy to read.
Overall, the fax quality with HelloFax was better than that of all the other services we tested, except for mFax. One standout feature that HelloFax offers for both free faxing and paid plans is integrated fax signing. If you upload a PDF to fax, you can easily add a digital signature, which is often required for business transactions or for signing agreements like loan documents. All 15 faxes that we sent or received with HelloFax went through smoothly, but they took a minute or two longer to transmit than with some of the other fax services.
If you run into a problem with HelloFax and with any kind of communications technology, glitches are bound to happen , its customer service might frustrate you. We read a couple of similar complaints from HelloFax customers in a few forums. But if you have a mission-critical fax to send, consider our other pick, SRFax , because it offers phone support, and it responded to our emailed service request within an hour, rather than days.
SRFax is the best online fax service for professionals and anyone else who needs to send and receive faxes on a regular basis. It has the lowest-priced subscription plan of the fax services we reviewed, and it has the best prices on a per-page basis for high-volume faxing sending or receiving over pages a month. If you need a fax number, and you often send or receive faxes, we think SRFax is the service for the job.
However, for most of its subscription plans, it does offer a generous, day free trial, during which time you can send and receive faxes willy-nilly before being charged. For regular but low-volume faxing needs, this is a great option. If you send and receive a high volume of faxes, SRFax offers excellent per-page value. SRFax was as reliable in our tests as HelloFax, sending and receiving faxes without a glitch, but the quality was just a bit grainier.
The results were still plenty legible with SRFax, but it might be something to consider if you have to send a fax with teeny-tiny fine print. The only feature we wish SRFax included, to match that of other fax services, is the ability to send a file from a cloud-storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.
Hands-down, mFax sent the highest-quality faxes in our testing. Most of the fax services we tested struggled with the graphics-intensive PDF file we faxed—likely because they were trying to optimize or compress the file for faxing. But mFax sent the PDF fax without any additional noise or quality degradation. The page IRS PDF file we faxed from mFax looked identical to the original, while the faxes from other services were of slightly lower quality. Aside from lacking two-factor authentication for account security, mFax checks all the boxes for a great online fax service.
In particular, images and any kind of shading look pretty bad. But for simple text-only faxing, Windows Fax and Scan can do the job. To use Fax and Scan, you might need to enable the service in your Windows settings.
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