Wednesday Work Tip #5: Fax for Free, Fax Alternatives

Last week's newsletter from our Freebies Guide, Lee Seats, had an article about how to send and receive free faxes. You can get limited free fax sending from FaxZero and unlimited free fax receiving from FaxDigits.

In case you're not familiar with Internet-based faxing, it allows you to receive inbound faxes as PDF attachments in your e-mail, and to send faxes over the Internet, either via a printer driver or via an application or web site in which you upload the file you want to send and then specify the recipient information. No dedicated phone line, no fax machine to buy, maintain, and take up desk space.

Personally, I hate faxes. They feel sooo... last-century. I try to keep my office paperless. I've managed to work it so that I almost never need to use fax, and for the rare occasion I do, I've used a free account from J2, which provides limited free inbound faxing. I receive maybe 2-3 faxes a year -- hardly enough to justify the expense of a fax machine or a full-featured Internet fax service (typically $10-$15 a month).

What do I do instead? I insert my signature into the document and print to PDF. Some people would probably express security concerns over that, but you know what? If you fax a document with your signature and they receive it on their end electronically, they still have a digital image of your signature on their end. What's the difference? And if the actual signature on the contract is that important, you need to send originals around anyway.

If you're like me and don't do a lot of business by fax, save the money, save the desk space, save a tree!