Though the fax is ancient technology, it is still widely used by many offices. Being able to receive your faxes on your iPhone helps brings new life to this aging technology by adding the freedom to receive faxes on the go. No more waiting to get back to the office to check on an important document. No more maintaining multiple fax machines at offices and home. Also by receiving the fax on your phone, it is immediately paperless, searchable, private and easily filed for future retrieval (I have faxes going back 10 years). Not to mention that there is no toner, paper or other supplies to maintain. Faxes can be annotated, commented on and forwarded to anyone with an email account and even forwarded to another fax machine.

The product is called eFax (original, eh?). The idea is simple, give the customer a private incoming fax number. The system accepts the fax and forwards it to an assigned email account as a PDF.

Go to their website to signup for a free account. The free accounts are assigned a random area code in the US. But if you upgrade to a paid account you can have a phone number closer to your place of business/home (I use a paid account). Setup the account to forward all faxes to an email account that you can access on your iPhone or other mobile device. Make sure you set the format as PDF (it can also send it as a efx format). Thats it. Now all faxes sent to that number will be forwarded to your email account as an attachment. The fax can now be viewed on any email client. The system can also be used as a voicemail box. So any voice messages that are received at that number are sent to the assigned email address as an attached voiceclip (I don’t use this feature that much as I profer to receive my voicemails on my phone directly).

I have been using them for the past 13 years and they have found the service to be extremely reliable. I have the faxes setup to go to my main email account which syncs between my iPhone, iPad, laptop, desktop and the webclient- now I can access my faxes no matter what machine I happen to have. This has saved countless hours of time and effort over the years.

Give it a try. www.efax.com

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