Free Inbound Faxing

Receive a Fax for Free

Yes, you can get inbound faxes delivered to you electronically, for free. There are several ways to get a free fax number that will forward incoming faxes to you via email or web, and the senders will never know you don't have a real fax machine. Fax machines are so 1990... free online faxing (both inbound and outbound) is the way the cool kids do it now. :-)

My favorite free inbound fax service is Faxaway. This company has been in business since 1995 and despite their "Web 0.9" website, the service is rock solid. Sign up for a free Faxaway account and it will allow you to receive faxes and voicemails for free via your email account.

Here's how it works: Faxaway gives you a real fax number that you can give to anyone who wants to send a fax to you. When that fax number receives an inbound fax, Faxaway answers the call, saves the fax as a TIF image, and forwards it on to your email address. I don't care if they do it with computers, pigeons or monkeys -- but it works great. The only downside is that you probably won't get a local fax number. Mine is in a Seattle area code, and I'm in New York, but that's never been a problem for me.

I've had a Faxaway account for years, even though I do have a fax machine. I live out of my inbox, so it's nice to be able to search and refer back to faxes I received a while ago. Oh, and I get to choose whether or not they are printed. If you've ever come home and found 100 junk faxes piled on the floor beneath your fax machine, unplug that beast and make the switch to email-based incoming faxes.

eFax is another well known free fax service online. They offer three different account types. The eFax FREE account, also referred to as their Limited Account, will provide you with a non-local fax line and up to 20 incoming faxes. But be aware that they call it "Limited" for a good reason. If you receive more than 20 fax pages in any thirty day period, eFax may terminate or suspend your account if you do not upgrade to a paid subscription service. The eFaxPro package will let you receive 200 faxes a month and will allow you to send faxes from your email for less than $20 per month. The eFaxPlus program is a few dollars cheaper per month and will let you receive up to 130 faxes per month, as well as send faxes through your email account. You can also bring an existing number to eFax, if you want to junk our dinosaur fax machine and go digital.

FaxBetter offers a free toll free fax number to anyone. Faxes are received in your email inbox as a PDF attachment. That's pretty standard, but what separates FaxBetter is that all faxes received are OCRed. This means the actual text from the fax is extracted by Optical Character Recognition and is then embedded into the body of the email, thus making the email searchable in your email program (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.). The free service is limited to 50 incoming pages per month, and you have to receive a fax every 7 days to keep your free toll free fax number.

Benefits of Using a Free Fax to Email Service

Online based fax services offer users several advantages. First of all you don't have to waste valuable desk space on a bulky fax machine. You don't have to spend money on a fax machine that will most likely be outdated within a year or two. Online based fax services also allow you to send and receive faxes anywhere you have access to your email account and a computer. This means that you can retrieve a fax while at your office, while at a client's office or while you are out of town. Finally, online fax services are environmentally more friendly than a traditional fax machine, because there's no paper waste, no toner, and no obsolete machine to ultimately junk or recycle.

In addition to Faxaway, eFax and FaxBetter, there are other fax-to-email services, some of which offer free trials. I can't personally recommend any of those because I have not used them. If you've found one that you like, feel free to post a comment below...