Fax MachineWe have our Asterisk phone system setup to receive faxes and forward them to email, it is a handy feature that saves a lot of paper considering that the majority of our faxes are junk. A few days ago, after an extended power outage, when we brought the system back up, fax to email stopped working. A quick investigation found that it would just drop the call whenever it tried to detect the fax tones. I remembered that getting fax to email working initially had been tricky and that the forums had stated that the feature was flaky. I didn’t have the time to troubleshoot but I couldn’t just leave us without fax support. I decided that I could temporarily forward our fax lines to eFax or something similar until I had the time to troubleshoot or upgrade the phone system to the latest version of TrixBox, where faxing is stable.

Before going with eFax I did a little searching and found a lot of discontentment on the web with them. Users were not happy that they kept raising prices and I did want to deal with limits on incoming faxes.

I stumbled upon a free unified messaging service K7.net that channels voicemails and faxes to email for free. They assign you a number with a 206 area code and your account will stay active as long as you receive a call or fax message every 30 days. We have used K7.net for several days now and it works great.

I also found FaxZero, a service that allows you to send free faxes by uploading a doc or PDF. There is a limit of two 3 page faxes per day for the free service and they put an ad on the cover page. It does come in handy when you are in pinch or just need to test faxing.