Does adding an ‘e’ to fax improve communication?

The Hewlett Packard OfficeJet fax machine next to my desk is, for all intents and purposes, an antique. It takes minutes to receive a transmission and half an eternity to print it. Sometimes it gives up the ghost midway through a fax and stubbornly refuses to budge. The paper sticks together when I send multiple pages, shooting a stream of unintelligible data to the baffled recipient.

As my old HP ages, its problems become more critical. A few months ago, I got a mysterious error message warning me that my cartridge was out of ink even though it wasn’t. I was on the verge of throwing the whole unit out the window until my younger brother decided to open the malfunctioning machine and operate without the benefit of technical manuals or any prior fax repair experience. He removed a metal bar at random and, wouldn’t you know it, the darned thing started printing again.

But when a client tried to send a multiple-page document to my feeble fax last week, the HP stalled again. After half a dozen failed attempts to send, he finally called me and said, “do me a favor and get an eFax number.”

eFax is no different from an ordinary fax, except that instead of rendering the document as a printed page, it compresses it into a graphical attachment and e-mails it to you. The site issues you an honest-to-goodness phone number for incoming faxes that you give out to people. But perhaps the best thing about eFax is that it doesn’t cost a dime. The service will release your e-mail address in some cases, so you may get a little spam in the can after signing up for the service. Other than that, eFax really does all that it promises.

Just don’t expect any more than that. I raised my standards beyond what I should have and lived to regret the day that I sent my old HP into semi-retirement. For example, I naively thought that the e-mail attachments would be brief. They aren’t. A typical three-page fax takes several minutes to download. Once there, I have to open a cumbersome graphic converter on my desktop that, eFax warns, “we do not support.” It would be easier and faster to simply receive a fax on my computer than to mess with the program. Frequent travelers have raved about eFax because they can retrieve documents from anywhere in the world. That’s true, but when a long fax takes upwards of half an hour to download — as one of mine did — you have to start wondering if the connection charges will be greater than the expense of calling your clients and giving them the fax number at your hotel, plus paying the often exorbitant per-page fax charges at the property.

I assumed (and I really shouldn’t have) that eFax would take the document and either compress it to such an extent that it would really fly or use character recognition software to turn the document into a text-only e-mail. But now that I think about it, both assumptions are unrealistic. What if the document is handwritten? How about pictures? What would eFax do with charts? Indeed, compression technology is an emerging discipline in dire need of better standards, and I can’t blame eFax for that. Another problem is timeliness of the service. Real faxes are delivered in real time. eFaxes can take a while — minutes or even hours. This could be troublesome to travelers who rely on the timely receipt of faxes to do business, although it didn’t bother me as much. Most of my documents arrived after crunch time, when my dial-up connection maxes out at 56 Kbps and there was little chance of getting kicked offline.

So do I have any suggestions on how to improve eFax? Well, after researching the other Internet fax services out there, I’m persuaded that eFax is among the best — if not the best — in its class. Tough to top a service that’s free. However, like all things online, it’ll just be a matter of time before another company comes along and outdoes eFax. Take the new onebox.com, which bills itself as “the world’s first free consumer communications service that combines voicemail, fax and email in one tidy little package.” The service offers a free personal, local telephone number and an e-mail address and lets anyone who calls it leave voicemails and faxes. The messages can then instantly be retrieved over the phone or on the Web.

It doesn’t take a hack Internet columnist to see where all of this is going. Before long, we’ll be able to retrieve virtually any kind of information video clips, e-mail messages, presentations, and faxes from a personal Web site or a cellular phone or a regular phone (inasmuch as the medium will allow that). I like that. Checking my messages wirelessly from a personal digital assistant or from someone else’s Web connection isn’t just cool, it’s also convenient.

eFax may not be the end-all, but it’s a great start.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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