How-To Geek
How to Send and Receive Faxes Online Without a Fax Machine or Phone Line

Some slow-moving businesses and government agencies may not accept documents over email, forcing you to fax them in. If you are forced to send a fax, you can do it from your computer for free.
We’ve previously covered ways to electronically sign documents without printing and scanning them. With this process, you can digitally sign a document and fax it to a business — all on your computer and without any printing required.
How Fax Machines Work (and Why They’re So Inconvenient)
This isn’t as easy as it should be. Fax machines are all connected to the plain old telephone lines. When you use a standard fax machine, that fax machine places a phone call to the number you specify. The fax machine at the destination number answers and the document is transmitted over a telephone call.
This process was invented before the Internet and seems laughably archaic at this point. To perform a fax, a person may type up a document, print it out, and scan it into the fax machine which sends it over the phone line. The person receiving the fax may then scan the faxed document and turn it back into a digital file. They’ve come full circle — the document was sent from one computer to another computer with much additional work and lost image quality.
Ideally, you’d be able to submit a document via email or a more secure online method. Many businesses consider fax a secure method of transmitting documents, but it really isn’t — if someone was snooping on the phone line, they could easily intercept all the faxed documents.
There’s no way to connect to a fax machine directly over the Internet, as the fax machine is only connected to telephone lines. To perform a fax online, we’ll need some sort of gateway that accepts documents via the Internet and transmits the document to a fax machine. That’s where the below services come in. Give them a document and they’ll do the annoying work of dialing up the fax machine and sending your document over the telephone line.

You Could Fax With Just Your Computer, But…
You could skip the below services, of course. Microsoft Windows even contains a Fax and Scan application that allows you to send faxes. The catch is that you’d need your computer connected to the phone line — yes, this means that you’d need a dial-up fax modem. You’d also need a landline telephone connection and you’d have to tell people to stay off the phone when you’re sending faxes, just like in the old dial-up Internet days. Of course, if you were faxing a lot, you could pay for a a dedicated fax telephone line — this might even be necessary if you were receiving a lot of faxes.
This obviously isn’t ideal. Sure, if you need to send quite a few faxes, go ahead and buy a fax machine or modem and hook it up to your landline. But you probably don’t need to send and receive faxes this often — you hopefully just need to send the occasional fax whenever you bump into an organization that’s stuck in the past.
Scan the Document or Use an Existing Digital File
The basic process is simple. First, you’ll need to scan the document you want to fax, just as if you were going to send that document over email. if you don’t have a scanner lying around, you may want to try scanning it with your smartphone. If the document is already a file on your computer, congratulations — you don’t have to scan anything.
With the document now in digital form, you can send it along to a service that will do the annoying fax work for you.

Send Faxes Online, Free
There are so many online fax services out there that it’s hard to make an informed decision about which one to choose. The first thing to consider is what kind of a user you are, how often you’ll be faxing, and what features you need.
Power User: RingCentral Fax
If you are going to be sending sensitive faxes all the time, or you work for a company and you’re trying to choose a service, RingCentral Fax, which is partially owned by Cisco and AT&T, is probably the best choice for your needs, especially since they have a lot of great security features and support for multiple users with separate fax lines.
It has all the features you can imagine, including integrations with Outlook, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and you can even get a toll-free number. It also has a lot of security features that would be useful for businesses or people that are transmitting secure information.
Of course, if you just want to send a few faxes, you can sign up for one of their cheap plans that start under $7 per month… and then just cancel after a month or two.
Occasional User
If you do need to send the occasional fax, we recommend MyFax, which lets you send up to 10 free pages without having to pay. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more pages per month than most people have to fax per year. If you do need to send more pages each month, you can upgrade to a regular plan.

You’ll need to confirm your email address in order to send the free fax.
Receiving Faxes
If you do need to receive faxes, you’ll have to sign up for a paid service. The service will need to establish a dedicated phone number for your fax line, and that costs money. RingCentral, MyFax, and many other services will do this if you pay.
Luckily, you should at least be able to get a free trial — RingCentral offers 30 days of free fax receiving, for example.
There are many fax services to use, and if you just need to send the occasional fax, you can manage to do that for free, but if you want to receive a fax, you’ll end up needing to sign up for a trial account. You can always cancel if you want.
Image Credit: Matt Jiggins on Flickr, David Voegtle on Flickr
a service that i can use at home. sending a fax is getting expensive. well done article.
@ChrisHoffman The last time I contacted HelloFax, they let me know that the 5 free pages offer is not per month. The offer is five pages total and once used up it costs $1 a page to fax. Also, as far as receiving faxes, there is a free service called http://voicemail.k7.net/ . It is a bare bones (no eye candy) service, but gets the job done. Takes about 5 minutes to set up. Hope this helps readers out. Love your site by the way.
I would just like to add some more info to this topic but this should help anyone who faxes a lot our a little but if one would decide to try this it has worked great for my wife and I and we have two separate phone numbers which we have dedicated one for our faxing all through our cable service TWC and it has worked past our expectation's .Although you can use the second line for phone calls also if needed .Here is the link and we only pay $110.00 per yr. and a monthly tax etc. for calls or faxes made which only ends up to 2.00 to 3.00 dollars a month. Lots and lots of extras to.
[Only way to go !]
http://www.ooma.com/
Most US Government communications require Fax.
As a Builder, I always include a Fax Modem Card in my Builds.
The Best Modems are what's known as Hardware Modems but they require a PCI Slot.
Since most new motherboards only have PCIe Slots, then a Software Modem like this is what's needed.
http://www.usr.com/products/modem/modem-product.asp?sku=USR5638
A Fax Modem can be used at the same time as DSL, just be sure to use a Filter Jack.
http://www.usr.com/products/modem/modem-comparison.asp
ADDED:Your Bank will always be glad to Fax for you if your equipment does not support Fax.
For receiving faxes you can sign up and use eFax Free plan which allows up to 10 received pages per month however the free plan does not include any outgoing/sent pages. The only caveat is faxes you received can only be viewed with a proprietary reader. I have a junk Oracle Virtualbox VM that has the eFax reader and other junk software. I then print it to a PDF for future reading/printing.
Therefore you could use Hellofax for outbound and eFax for inbound.
k7.net is what i've been using for that rare fax
I deal with the VA constantly so I have to have Fax Capability in the machines.
I use faxzero to send them, and efax to receive them. When this subject came up, I realized that I could no longer do it, so I downloaded and installed efax messenger 4.4--you may need to google this to find it for your machine. Faxzero is a free faxing site (with the usual limitations)--the faxes can be received as e-mails, and you need efax to read them--they give you a fax number, so for anyone who uses it, it will come in as a e-mail. Sent myself a fax, and it worked fine. Good deal to someone (like me) who sends and receives faxes very seldom.
FrGeorge
None of the online services suit me - they all involve lots of extra steps.I send >200 pages of faxes/month and receive about 50 pages.month.Nearly everything I send is some sort of box that opens in my employer's website - i.e. open orders, open invoices, open parts orders, shipping notification, etc.I am using FaxTalk Pro software + modem + phone line from my cable provider.To send all I have to do is print to FaxTalk printer driver and select phone number to send to.FaxTalk allows annotation and rotation.FaxTalk has an internal phone book, or it can use OutLook's.All the fax services I have looked at require that I save what I want to fax then open an email client - many more steps.I'm posting because I may not be the only one who usually faxes what is already on a computer screen. If your time is important/valuable, why go through all the saving/converting/rmailing steps.