This entire week I'm at the U.N. observing the disability convention proceedings. At the same time, I'm trying to close on my new house in New Haven. This would all be impossible if it wasn't for the confluence of two things.
First, the U.N. is almost entirely wirelessly accessible. All of the major meeting rooms have WiFi access. With the exception of the singular lack of power outlets in conference room four (the main meeting room for the convention), it's ideal for multi-tasking with your laptop.
I use two e-fax services to send and receive the many faxes that are necessary to close a house:
Receiving: I use the free efax service provided by efax.com. The free account allows you to receive faxes which are e-mailed to you as multi-page TIFF attachments (which the Mac OSX Preview application can read). The paid account will give you a phone number in the area code (and country) of your choosing (including Japan) as well as allowing you to send faxes. But the paid account is $13/month so I am sticking with the free receive-only account.
Sending: So how do I send faxes? I just found a fantastic new service called FaxItNice.com. They charge only 11 cents a page for domestic faxes and not much more for international faxing. They don't charge a monthly fee, nor do they require any software to be installed, and you can even fax a'la carte. They don't yet list Japan/China/Korea as places you can fax to, but I sent them an inquiry and received a personal reply within an hour from two of their staffers that they are adding these countries (and more) in their next release.
As with all the reviews on this site, I don't receive any kickbacks for promoting either company.
Thanks! I've been using e-fax for a while, but needed a cheap and easy way to send faxes!
Thank You! This is wonderful. Just what I have been looking for.
Much appreciated.
Bob
If you have an always-on Mac at home (a Mac Mini is perfect as a home server), you can use its built-in fax capabilities and set it up to forward incoming faxes via email. You could probably set up an Automator workflow to fax out PDFs received via email.
Fazal -
Good suggestion! My problem is that I don't have a landline anymore and doubt I'll sign up for one when I move into my house. I'm all wireless at this moment.
This is going to be a problem with my (series 1) TiVO service. Does anyone know of any gadgets or adapters that you can hook up to your cell phone to turn it into a Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) RJ-11 jack? I've seen cordless phones that integrate with wireless/cell phones but nothing that would let you hook a TiVo to a cell phone.
In terms of the original post, I should mention that while Preview.app does a good job of viewing the bizarro multi-page TIFF files that the free eFax sends you, it isn't able to print them properly (in my experience).
GraphicConverter (a fantastic shareware app that's a mini-Photoshop) can both view and print multipage TIFFs without problems.
What I end up doing is using GraphicConverter to "Print as PDF" the TIFF files. That way, all of my faxes end up as PDF files.
FaxItNice.com just announced that they have expanded country support with over 200 countries listed. Prices are very reasonable too: $2 flat rate to Japan for up to 5 pages and only about 18c per page after that. See rates here: http://www.faxitnice.com/PricingFINCredit
FaxItNice raised their domestic prices to 18 cents a page.
There's now a master list of online fax services: http://internetfaxproviders.com/
Once I run down my credit on FaxItNice, I might switch providers since their 18 cents/page is no longer very competitive.
Faxitnice has raised their prices so they're no longer really a good option. Anyone have another solution?
I just sent a three page fax to Okinawa and was very pleased that the price was only 75 cents. What a deal!