A Modem Paves the Way for Many Fax Options

Nearly everyone reading this column today has a fax machine. Oh, you may not have one of those overblown telephones with paper inside, but chances are if you’re reading this, you have a modem, and if you have a modem, you in all likelihood have a way to send and receive faxes.

That’s because the great majority of modems sold today have built-in fax capabilities. Yet in my experience, surprisingly few computer users take advantage of this very handy function, which can save time and money.

Moreover, even a non-fax modem lets you send a fax, simply by using one of the commercial on-line services or an Internet fax service. Sending faxes this way is fast, relatively simple, and ideal if you only send a fax now and then--from home, for example. Fax modems are especially handy in notebook computers, and faxes sent directly by modem or as e-mail are often of excellent quality, since they aren’t being scanned off paper.

In my book, the most interesting development in this whole arena is a nonprofit effort to make the Internet function as a fax distribution system. Sponsored by Internet pioneers Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose, the project is enlisting Internet sites to install fax modems so that specially addressed electronic mail can be sent to fax machines within the site’s local calling area.

A properly addressed e-mail message from London to, say, Washington, D.C. would find its way to an Internet site in Washington that has already agreed to act as an e-mail fax distribution center. At this site, a computer would read the phone number from the address, dial the intended recipient’s fax, and fire away.

The main shortcoming so far is that many places aren’t covered, although the list is growing all the time. Besides Washington, it includes the Silicon Valley; New York City; metropolitan Boston; parts of Southern California, and a number of foreign countries, including Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, and Taiwan.

Addressing e-mail to be sent as a fax and making the message generate your cover sheet can be a little tricky at first. But the service won’t cost you anything more than a regular e-mail message, which is to say virtually nothing. Thus you save a bundle on long-distance phone charges, especially if you’re sending overseas. If your Internet provider supports MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), you can even send images as well as text.

Consider the possibilities: Even people without e-mail will be able to get such messages by fax. Long-distance phone charges won’t be such a barrier to communications, either, and individuals will be able to distribute information incredibly cheaply by sending a single piece of e-mail that comes out on paper at 10,000 different locations, ready to be read. (And you think you get a lot of junk mail now!)

Cyberspace denizens who don’t yet want to tangle with the complexities of Internet faxing have several options. For a fee, users of CompuServe, America Online, MCI Mail and some other commercial services can easily send e-mail to any fax machine. If you don’t have a regular fax machine, are sending long-distance, or want to send the same fax to several people, this can be a good way to go. It’s ideal for those who need to send faxes infrequently, and it sure beats schlepping down to the copy shop.

Sending a fax using a commercial on-line service is easy. On CompuServe, for instance, just create a message as you normally would, and address it to FAX:14155551234, or whatever the number happens to be. For domestic faxes, the fee is 75 cents for the first 1,000 characters and 25 cents for each additional 1,000. (By way of perspective, this column, about 5,000 characters, would cost $1.75.) On America Online, use the keyword FAX for fees and instructions. There are also a number of services that, for a fee, allow Internet users to send Internet e-mail to any fax machine. (See accompanying box.)

Perhaps the best faxing tool associated with your computer is your fax modem, which you can use to send elaborately formatted documents out of your computer just as easily as you would print them. And don’t forget: You can also use your fax modem to receive faxes. Receiving this way can be especially nice because it’s private, and you then have the option of printing the received document ( voila , a plain paper fax!), storing it on your hard drive or deleting it.

You can even use optical character recognition software to translate the fax, which is really an image, into editable text. Many fax software packages come with OCR modules built in, and although they are far from perfect, they are fine for occasional use, especially if the received fax doesn’t employ a lot of fancy fonts.

I recently used OCR in just this way to get some essays I had written years ago, on a typewriter, into my computer. I had my wife fax them from her office to my PC fax/modem. Then I used OCR to translate the material into text, which I can edit and print at will. In a pinch, in other words, you can use a conventional fax machine as a sort of scanner. And, of course, if you have a scanner, you can feed pages into your computer for faxing.

As a cheapskate, one of my favorite things about faxing by modem is scheduling faxes for transmission when the phone rates go down, and when your computer is idle anyway. I can send a full-page fax this way in less than a minute, at a cost of about a dime. Even at midday, when rates are highest, it’s still only 20 cents. Don’t you wonder sometimes how the Postal Service stays in business?

BTW: Last week I gave the right address but the wrong command for subscribing to Robert Seidman’s fine “In, Around and Online” Internet newsletter. To subscribe, e-mail listserv@clark.net with the message subscribe online-l Willy Loman (or whatever your name happens to be). Sorry about that.

Daniel Akst, a Los Angeles writer, is a former assistant business editor for technology at The Times. He welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com but regrets that he cannot reply to all of them.

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For More Internet Fax Facts . . .

For more information about the Malamud-Rose Internet remote printing project, which seeks to make the Internet function as a fax distribution system, send any message to tpc-faq@town. hall.org. You’ll automatically get back e-mail describing the project. To find out which parts of the globe are covered, send e-mail to tpc-coverage@town.hall.org, which will also generate an automated reply.

For a roundup of what’s happening generally with Internet faxing, including services that charge, e-mail savetz@rahul.net. The body of the message is ignored, but be sure the Subject line says send fax-faq. You’ll get back a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document on the subject from Internet author Kevin Savetz.