The very first Email fax was started on 1997. On June 24, 1997 - PSINet, the first commercial ISP introduced InternetPaper(SM) a service that sent documents from your desktop PC to any fax machine on the planet through the Internet. Nowadays with the rapid growth of Internet users worldwide, Email fax has become one of the latest technologies that change how people connect to each other. By implementing Email faxing software, users can turn hardcopy documents into Email attachment or vise versa, receive hardcopy fax in Email format. The appearance of Email faxing reduces the faxing cost greatly and provides a powerful alternative for those that cannot afford a faxing machine.

So how does email faxing works?

To send an Internet fax, the user needs to create an email account. The fax content can be written in the body of the email, and attachments are normally permitted. The destination fax number is entered in the ‘To’ field, along with the Internet fax service name (efax for example). For example, if the fax number were 1-555-234-5678, the email would be addressed to 15552345678@efax.com. In the subject·field, user will need to input the recipient name, for example: Attn: Mr. Fax.

Receiving Internet faxes is even easier. If you are using Internet fax number, you will receive faxes as email attachment; if you are using conventional fax machine, your faxes will be receive from your fax machine just as others. Because Internet fax is sent in email form via the Internet - you can access your faxes wherever you have the Internet. This is ideal for mobile professionals, business travelers and for the ordinary person on vacation!

What are the options for Internet fax?

In the past year and a half, several vendors have produced and are selling Internet faxing services. There are several different flavors of this idea. There are companies that offer software only solutions that allow you to fax directly from your computer to any fax machine; and there are services offer fax-to-IP Internet gateway products, which are hardware-based routers that emulate a fax machines.

Faxing services that use software (for example eFax) require that you sign up with fax service provider. Using this software makes faxing as easy as printing. These services are good for companies that primarily send outgoing faxes from their computers.

The advantages of using this method are that faxing becomes considerably cheaper because you are not making long distance connections over the phone lines, no hardware is required, you get faster transmission, you can send many faxes at once, no dedicated fax lines are needed, and a web interface is available if you wish to add fax-on-demand capability to a website.

The disadvantages are documents must be sent from your computer. With these services, there is no support for fax-to-IP gateways.

While for fax-to-IP Internet gateway products you will need a hardware based routers that emulate a fax machines. With these, faxing is done in the regular way using the fax machine, but the gateway device, which then dials the destination fax machine and sends the fax, interrupts the process.

This service is good if you don't send a lot of faxes, but would still like to take advantage of the savings of using Internet delivery. It is also good if you do a lot of international fax calls. The disadvantages are that you won't save much on either domestic faxing, or faxing to countries where the Internet infrastructure is less well developed.