Internet Fax

For many businesspeople, the task of receiving faxes from colleagues and clients is inconvenient and time-consuming, and is thus viewed as a necessary evil. Despite the introduction of other communications tools, fax still has a definite use in the business world.

 

Still, being tied to the fax machine to receive important documents wastes time, especially since many people do most of their work from a desktop or laptop computer and when not at the desk are in meetings or traveling. Having to physically return to the fax machine can be a real time sink.

 

Packetel (News - Alert), a provider of communications services, knew there was a better way for people to receive faxes and designed its Internet fax service around that idea. The company offers a flat-rate, incoming fax-to-email service that lets subscribers receive an unlimited number of faxes delivered directly to their e-mail inbox.

 

One of the most convenient features of Packetel’s Internet fax service is the ability to receive multiple faxes simultaneously. With traditional fax, the machine can only process one document at a time. If multiple faxes are coming in, they go into a queue and each user waiting for a fax must sit through the queue until his or her document is printed.

 

Fax-to-email, though, works differently. Just as it is possible to receive many e-mail messages at the same time, faxes received in this way are not held up by a queue. Also, since users are individual subscribers, they receive only the faxes sent to them, rather than having to wait through or wade through faxes intended for other recipients.

 

In fact, privacy is another benefit of fax-to-email. Only the recipient of a fax can view it, unless he or she chooses to forward the information to someone else. Distributing copies of the fax to other people is easy, too; it works just like forwarding an e-mail message. And, money is saved on paper since only those who need a hard copy of the fax need to print it.

 

Packetel’s service also provides tools for filtering out junk faxes, the same way users filter junk mail out of their e-mail inboxes. Further, each subscriber can specify two different e-mail addresses where faxes should be received.

 

To learn more about the features and benefits of fax-to-email, please visit the Internet Fax channel on TMCnet.com, brought to you by Packetel.