1. Introduction

Fax machines are a relic of an era that existed before the Internet, yet fax capabilities are still a required component in many businesses. Online fax services bridge the divide between the Internet and fax machines, providing inbound and outbound fax capabilities without the need for an actual fax machine.

The online services are also always on and don't run out of paper or toner. Since they're online, they are available wherever you may be.

There are a whole bunch of different online fax services available today offering a wide range of features, functionality and pricing. In this review, we take a look at three online fax services: MyFax, eFax and TrustFax and compare their respective offerings to lay bare the facts on online Fax.

Features Table

TrustFax

TrustFax offers trial accounts, while service packages range in cost from $5 a month to $10 a month depending on the volume of pages sent and received.

Signing up and getting started with a trial account took less than five minutes. Upon completion of the signup process, you end up at the TrustFax "dashboard," which is simple and intuitive.

On the send side, the dialogue box is simple, allowing users to easily add files from a number of different locations (local computer, inbox or file cabinet). Once you click send, you need to switch over to the tracking screen in order to actually track the status of the outgoing fax. Trustfax will try a number for up to 15 attempts and then give up, while the number of tries is a user- defined preference. Unfortunately, the tracking does not indicate why an attempt failed (e.g. busy number, etc.), which would have been a useful feature.

Email confirmation of the sent fax status is sent once TrustFax has either successfully sent the fax or failed after the maximum number of tries.

TrustFax also has a mechanism for sending faxes via email (as opposed to being initiated from the TrustFax dashboard), which works well.

Incoming email worked flawlessly with TrustFax as well. Received faxes can be received as a .pdf attachment via email and are also viewable online through the dashboard. TrustFax also allows you to manipulate and work with the .pdf of the fax online, such that you can crop comments or add content (like a signature, for example) to the document.

For online file storage, TrustFax includes Filing Cabinet features though it is isn't on first blush directly connected to either the inbox or sent box but is just an online storage facility for whatever it is you want to store. I can certainly see how this feature can be useful, especially if you're saving a bunch of documents that you then want to send.

One feature that is somewhat lacking with TrustFax is the Address Book. By default, you need to start from scratch with no clear cut way of importing existing contacts. If there is a way to do that, TrustFax isn't making it easy to figure out since the service also does not have an integrated help or support feature that is accessible from the online dashboard.