How Internet Faxing Works

In this era of the paperless office and digital documents, it seems that the more paper and ink fax might finally be ready to retire. However, the fax remains an essential part of doing business in certain types of documents (legal contracts, for example) and some industries, such as public relations.

Desktop-fax software and services as possible to send and receive faxes without having to touch a real fax machine. With the fax desktop, cree any document on your computer can be sent to a fax machine via e-mail or the Web.

In this article we will talk about the Internet, fax, a kind of desktop fax in which outgoing email attachments become faxes and incoming faxes are converted into e-mail attachments.

Internet Fax Basics
With the Internet, fax any document that can be attached to an e-mail can be sent by fax to a fax machine analog. This includes Microsoft Word documents, PDF files and scanned images.

Internet fax is a hosted service, meaning they do not need to buy and install servers fax, modem and special software. Instead, you subscribe to a third party the Internet fax service that converts faxes and e-mails to faxes to e-mails for you.

Here are the three basic things you need to send faxes Internet:

1. An Internet connection
2. An e-mail account
3. A subscription to an Internet fax service

Once you have all three, here is like sending a fax using the Internet fax:

1. Since its desktop application or email Web, composing a message and attach the file you want to fax.
2. As the instructions of its subscription Internet-fax service, e-mail message to the recipient's fax number, plus a special extension (example: 18005551000@internetfax.com)
3. The service receives an e-mail attachment, encodes the attachment as fax data and sends it through a telephone line for the recipient's fax machine.

You can receive a fax on your computer in the same way:

1. Your subscription to Internet-fax service assigns you a free telephone line or regular fax number.
2. The sender mark that number, then sends the fax of a fax machine.
3. The subscription service receives the fax, converts the data into a an e-mail attachment and sends it to his email address.
4. To read the fax, simply open the attachment.

Since e-mail is the only application needed to send and receive faxes Internet, faxes can also be sent from a handheld device. Read on to find out more about the Internet fax of a PDA.