Send Fax from Gmail

Did you know that Gmail can be used for more than simple e-mail communications? If your business depends greatly on fax communications, you can now manage all your faxes digitally straight from your Gmail account. 

Gmail faxing is possible thanks to the help of email fax services, companies that put the bridge between fax and Gmail thanks to powerful fax server technology.  You can use any email address for this purpose.  In reality, recipients and senders won’t know that you are using a free email address, they will receive faxes normally and will send you faxes using a virtual fax number.

Upon creating your account with the fax service of your choice, you will receive a virtual fax number totally free of charge. This free number will allow you to receive fax on Gmail automatically without the need of complicated configurations and requirements. All services have different options when it comes to choosing your Gmail fax number, most of them will help you choose between a local and toll-free fax number.  If you are outside the USA check that the service of your choice has international coverage. Some companies like eFax cover many countries around the world 8with local numbers included), while others such as Ringcentral and MyFax have specific plans and prices for UK and Canada.

When you send a fax via Gmail, you send it as an attachment.  There are a lot of different file formats you can work with, but among the most common ones you have JPG, TIFF, DOC, XLS, PDF, TXT among others.  Compatibility with different file formats will depend on the service you are using.  Right now, the option that brings most compatibility is MyFax, which supports up to 142 different file types.

When you press SEND, this attachment travels to the fax company’s servers, where it is converted into a fax image.  Once the digital file has been converted, it travels to the recipient’s location, where it can be received by a fax machine without problems. How much does this process works? Well, in average you can expect a fax to be sent within 30 seconds / 1 minute. You receive a confirmation afterwards.

Another point to keep in mind when you want to start out with using fax with gmail is that the recipient’s number will be entered as if it is an email address. Luckily, there’s nothing complicated about this.  Let’s say your fax number is “303-477-4311”; you go to the TO field in Gmail’s compose window and enter 3034774311@faxservice.com.  You just replace faxservice.com with the information that is provided to you at the moment of signing up. For example, if you are going to send a fax via RingCentral, you just type 3034774311@rcfax.com. This will send the fax to the company’s servers and at the same time indicate the number where it must be delivered.

As you can see, sending fax via Gmail is very easy and receiving them is even easier! Right now is a perfect time to get started with this new way of faxing, there are plenty of good alternatives to choose from (we will take a look at them in upcoming posts), and the best of all is that you can start for free.  How? By taking advantage of free trials.  The top companies in the field are offering 30 day free trials where you can fully test the features of a service, and you can even opt to have a virtual fax number.