Fax without Paper

You may think of fax as an outmoded technology that was long ago supplanted by email, but countless people still send and receive faxes every day. In certain environments—notably medical and legal practices—it’s widely considered more reliable and more secure than email. If you can’t remember the last time you had to deal with faxing documents, feel free to skip this chapter. But if you do find a need to send or receive documents by fax, even if only occasionally, this final chapter explains how to do so without owning a fax machine or generating any paper.

Receive Incoming Faxes

I’m not shocked that people still send and receive faxes, but I am a bit baffled as to why anyone would want a fax machine, as such, in this day and age. Apart from the bulk of another device, there’s the infrastructure. Although a fax machine can sometimes share a landline with a telephone, doing so makes it more awkward for both the fax sender and the receiver—and if you give it a separate line, then that’s an extra monthly expense. Who needs all that bother?

Since you’re a Mac user, you have (at least) two excellent ways to receive faxes without having an extra box on your desk, and without generating extra paper. I’ll tell you about my favorite method first—the fax-to-email gateway—and then say a few words about using a modem.

Note: I’m deliberately omitting multifunction devices (which combine printer, scanner, copier, and fax machine) from this discussion, because most of the arguments against using a stand-alone machine for receiving faxes apply equally to them, too.

Use a Fax-to-Email Gateway

A fax-to-email gateway works like this. You sign up with a provider and receive a private fax number. (Usually, you get to choose the area code—and sometimes the exchange too.) When a fax machine dials that number, a computer answers, receives the incoming fax, and saves the image as a digital file (perhaps a PDF or a multi-page TIFF). Then it sends you the file as an email attachment—or, in some cases, merely sends you an email notification and lets you download the image itself using a Web browser or desktop application.

Note: The eFax and Nextiva fax-to-email gateways let you keep your existing fax number (others may, too, but I have confirmed only about those two). If lots of people already have your current number, using a service that requires you to switch to a different number may involve some inconvenience.

As far as the sender is concerned, the experience is identical to sending a fax to an ordinary fax machine—they’ll never know that’s not what they did. But from your point of view, receiving a fax is just like getting an email message. But there’s a bonus: you can perform OCR on the incoming fax, just as you can on any scanned document (if the fax service provider doesn’t already do this for you)—and then archive it along with all your other searchable PDFs.

Oodles of companies offer services like this, and pricing plans vary—you may pay a monthly fee, a per-fax or per-page fee, or a combination of these. But the prices are invariably less than what you’d pay for an extra phone line plus paper, toner, maintenance, and electricity for a stand-alone fax machine. Here are but a few examples:

• eFax
• jConnect
• MaxEmail
• MyFax
• Nextiva

I have no particular recommendations—my sense is that these services are more alike than different—but I’ll just mention that I’ve been a satisfied jConnect customer myself for years.

All these companies also let you send outgoing faxes without any extra equipment—I discuss that topic in just a moment.

Use a Modem for Incoming Faxes

A fax machine essentially consists of a scanner, a modem, a simple computer, and a printer. So anyone with a scanner, a modem attached to their computer, and the right software can replicate the functionality of a fax machine without a separate box sitting on their desk.

I remember the time—not so long ago—when all Macs had built-in modems. As broadband Internet connections became more common than dial-up access, most of those modems went unused, and in 2005 Apple phased them out and began selling an external USB modem for those people who still needed them. But even the Apple USB Modem was discontinued in 2009. So Mac users who want modems have to look for models made by other manufacturers—or hope to chance on a used Apple USB modem on eBay.

Note: 10.7 Lion and later no longer support the Apple USB Modem. If that’s the modem you have, you can follow these instructions only if you’re still running 10.6.x Snow Leopard or earlier—or if you happen to have a third-party USB modem that supports your version of Mac OS X (at least some models manufactured by U.S. Robotics do, as do some modems in multifunction printer/scanner/copier/fax devices).

If you have, or can locate, a compatible modem, then you can receive faxes on your Mac. Like a physical fax machine, a Mac-based fax will require a phone line. On the plus side, it will give you the capability of receiving faxes without having to print them—and, as with fax-to-email gateways, you can perform OCR on the resulting files.

To be blunt, I’d like to discourage you from doing this even if you’re running an older version of Mac OS X—I think it’s a cumbersome solution, and it has no future. But if you must use your Mac to receive incoming faxes, connect your modem and then do the following:

1. Open the Printers & Scanners pane of System Preferences (called Print & Fax, or some other variant, in older versions of Mac OS X).
2. Click the plus button.
3. In the Add window, click Fax in the toolbar, select your modem, and click Add. The window closes.
4. Back in the Printers & Scanners pane, select your virtual fax machine. Enter the phone number for the line to which the modem is connected.
5. Click Receive Options. Then select Receive Faxes on This Computer and set the other options—such as how many times the phone should ring before answering and where to save incoming faxes—as you prefer. Click OK, and then close System Preferences.

That’s it—your Mac is now a fax machine. (But read on for information about using it to send faxes.)

Send Outgoing Faxes

Just as you can use either a gateway or a modem to receive faxes, you can use the same two techniques to send outgoing faxes. The process isn’t exactly analogous, in that you’re generally starting with a computer-generated document, but it’s still simple.

Use an Email-to-Fax Gateway

As I mentioned earlier, every fax-to-email gateway also works in the other direction—it lets you send faxes from your computer, although the exact procedure may or may not involve email. For example:

• Email: Send email to a special address, and the text of the message (and/or an attached document) is converted to a fax. In some cases, you include the fax number in the email address. (For example, send a message to 15035551212@j2send.com and, because jConnect recognizes the From address associated with your account, it knows you’re allowed to send faxes; the part of the address before the @ is translated into the fax number.) In other cases, you’re expected to put the fax number in the subject or the first line of the message.

Note: For faxes that need a cover sheet, there’s usually some mechanism to create one—for instance, the text of the email message may be turned into a cover sheet, while the attachment is used for the remaining pages.

• Web: Log in to your account in a Web browser, compose or upload a document, enter the recipient’s fax number, and click Send.
• Desktop applications: Some services offer Mac programs that let you drag in (or compose) documents that serve as the fax’s content, design cover sheets, and connect to the Contacts app for fax numbers.
• Print-to-fax: Desktop software such as jConnect’s j2 Messenger can add features to standard Print dialogs, so that you can compose a document in nearly any application, choose File > Print, and then select the fax gateway and an associated fax number, instead of a printer, as the destination for your document.

And, many services offer some combination of these approaches.

In general, you can use any common document type for outbound faxes—for example, Word (.doc or .docx) or PDF. And, if you need to fax a document that you have only in paper form, no problem: scan it and then send the resulting file. I say more about occasions for doing this sort of thing in Sign Documents without Paper, earlier.

Send Outgoing Faxes Using Mac OS X

A few pages back, in Use a Modem for Incoming Faxes, I explained how to set up a Mac to use an external modem to receive faxes (noting that the Apple USB Modem is not supported in 10.7 Lion or later). Once you’ve followed those steps, you’re also set up to send outgoing faxes. Again, I advise against doing this if you can use an email-to-fax gateway instead. But to send a fax through your modem, follow these steps:

1. Compose your fax in any application that can print—Word, TextEdit, Mail, or whatever.
2. Choose File > Print. But instead of clicking Print immediately, choose your virtual fax machine from the Printer pop-up menu in the Print dialog.
3. In the To field, enter the recipient’s fax number; or, if that number is already in Contacts, click the plus button, select the number, and click To. Repeat as necessary to add more recipients; close the Addresses window when you’re done adding recipients.
4. If you need to enter a number or code before the number—say, to disable call waiting temporarily—enter it in the Dialing Prefix field.
5. To add a cover page, check the Use Cover Page checkbox and enter the text you want to appear in the Subject and Message fields.
6. Click Fax.

Mac OS X “prints” your document to the recipient’s fax machine.