Can I send a fax over the Internet?
There are a lot of different ways to send a fax over the internet. One of the most popular and universal ways is a program called Efax. This is a website that gives you a fax number and allows you to recieve faxes through your computers email program. It also allows you to send an email to the program that will translate it to a fax for a standard phone fax machine for somebody elses office. A lot of computers also come with phone connections, enabling you to scan a peice of paper into your computer to send it out. It's important to understand that the fax technology preceeded the internet. A fax takes a peice of paper, a static form, an analog peice of information, sends it through a phone line and breaks it into peices of data that get sent to another computer - another fax machine that puts them back together into a peice of paper. This is going from paper to data back to paper. Computers changed all of that because suddenly you're already in data. Your computer has already got the information that would normally send via fax on its hard drive, its already data, so in most cases you can email that information rather than fax it. But, if you need to send it to a fax machine, a computer with a telephone jack can be very commonly plugged in as a fax machine and rather than printing it , sending it through a fax machine to have it turned out as paper somewhere else. You send it straight from the data port of your computer , through your phone line to have it end up on somebody elses fax machine.
