Free Web Services Route Faxes to Your Computer Via E-Mail

Remember faxes?

Although no longer nearly as necessary in these days of e-mail, faxes still have a role, especially on those occasions when a non-digitized document has to be transmitted faster than snail mail.

You can receive faxes free, at any time, directly into your e-mail. Several Web sites offer the service, and as long as they stay in business (not a guarantee in these turbulent times for dot-coms) you can get your faxes in the comfort of your home. They will even arrive with the traditional, soft-focus look.

Here’s how it works.

Two of the sites offering the service are CallWave (https://www.callwave.com) and EFax (https://www.efax.com). Both work on Windows or Macintosh systems.

The first step is to go to the home page of one of the sites. Then on CallWave, click on Free Fax Numbers; on EFax, click on Sign Up.

From that point, both take you through a sign-up process that asks for your name, e-mail address and other information. EFax asks you to provide information on your income. Luckily, you can choose “decline to state” in this space.

Another note about EFax--be sure to sign up for its standard service if you want to use it free. EFax Plus, the site’s companion service that allows you to send faxes directly from your computer, costs $9.95 a month.

Upon completing the sign-up process on either site, you’ll be issued a private telephone number. That’s your fax number. Senders will have to pay the long-distance phone charges, if any.

The number issued to us by CallWave is in Nevada. The one from EFax is in Maryland.

You can access faxes via e-mail as attached graphics documents. There is the possibility of a glitch at this point if your computer is not configured to read a graphics file. If you use a fairly recent version of the Windows or Macintosh operating systems, there should be few problems.

The faxes arrived quickly on test runs--documents sent via CallWave and EFax both popped up in e-mail within 30 seconds of being transmitted on a machine. And they arrived in reasonably good, highly readable condition. Of course, the quality of the received fax will depend on the quality of the original.

Because the received documents are graphics files, the text and pictures on them cannot be easily manipulated. You might have some luck in putting the text into a word-processing program by using optical character recognition software, but it’s generally hit or miss, especially when used on a document that has less-than-sharp lettering.

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Times staff writer David Colker covers personal technology.