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The fax machine, like electronic mail, has helped revolutionize how we work. Businesses large and small send and receive faxes (short for facsimiles) any time a copy of a document is needed quickly on the other side of town, or the other side of the planet. Faxing has some advantages over electronic mail—you can easily send images and, more notably, your recipient doesn't need to be wired to the Internet to receive a fax. A phone line and an inexpensive machine or fax modem is all it takes.


Fax machines are devices that can send a copy of a printed page over a telephone line to another fax machine. Standard faxes work by "scanning" the page to transmit for light and dark areas. The machine converts the tonal values to sounds and sends them over a phone line to a recipient machine that converts the sounds back into light and dark tones and prints them on paper.


Although fax machines have been in popular use since the 1970s, the technology for turning the printed page into sound was invented hundreds of years ago. Not until the invention of the telephone and the proliferation of computers and microchips, did fax machines become a practical method of information exchange.


Here's the best part: because you're on the Internet, you don't even need a fax machine to send faxes. That's right—you can send a fax without using a fax machine or one of those fancy New-Age fax modems. There are several services for sending a fax via electronic mail. So, if you need to send a note to a friend or an associate who's not online, you can do so without logging out of your Net account.


Note: Although you may think fax machines are just a staple for big business, small offices and home-based businesses have also discovered their usefulness. If the current trend continues, by 1995, 30 percent of all U.S. homes will have a fax machine.

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Some of these services are free, run as experiments or by hobbyists. Others are commercial services that charge a fee for every fax you send. As you might expect, the quality and coverage of these services can vary considerably. The free services all have limited coverage areas: most span only a city or a few area codes. The commercial services often cover wider areas, but are (of necessity) more expensive.


So, how do you send a fax via e-mail? Read on. The following information discusses eight services that will let you do just that. And, since this is e-mail, you can send your fax to multiple destinations, or even a combination of fax machines and regular e-mail recipients. Be sure to notice that the procedure is not standardized because each service operates a little differently from the rest.


All of these services let you send plain old ASCII text. Some of them can even handle PostScript documents, should you want to send a fax with fancy formatting or graphics. But unlike a "real" fax machine, all of these services can only send information that is stored in your computer: that hand-written letter from Aunt Zelda and your kid's finger-paint artwork just can't be sent in this manner (unless, of course, you scan it in to your computer and convert the graphic to a PostScript document—I don't even want to think about that.). If you just want to send unformatted documents created with your word processor, you've got it easy