How to send a fax from email, without a fax machine

A fax machine is a scanner, a modem and a printer in one box, and two of those three you already own. What is left — the modem, and a phone line for it to dial out on — is the part an online fax service replaces. From your side the job becomes an email with an attachment.

What you need before you start

• The document, as a PDF. Almost anything converts, but a PDF is the format that survives the trip without surprises — see what a fax does to a PDF.
• The recipient's fax number, in full international form: country code, area code, number. A fax number looks like a phone number because it is one.
• A fax number of your own. Not to send — to receive the reply, and because the receiving machine prints your number at the top of every page it takes.

The steps

1. Open the fax you want to send from your dashboard, or start a new email to the number's address.
2. Attach the document. One file or several — they arrive as one fax, in the order you attached them.
3. Add a cover sheet if the recipient is an organisation rather than a person. What belongs on one is shorter than most templates suggest.
4. Send, and leave it. A fax is not instant: the line has to be dialled, answered and negotiated before the first page moves.

What the confirmation actually tells you

When the transmission finishes you get a report. It is worth understanding, because it is the only evidence you will ever have that the pages arrived: it records the far end answering, how many pages were negotiated and accepted, and how long the call took. What it does not record is whether anybody read them.

That distinction matters more than it sounds — it is the difference between a fax and an email read receipt, and it is why regulated industries still use fax at all. What a transmission report proves, and what it does not goes through it line by line.

When it does not go through

Most failures are the far end rather than your document: a line that rings out, a machine out of paper, a number that has been a voice line for two years. A fax service retries on its own for the ones worth retrying and tells you which cause it hit — the full list is in why a fax failed.

The one failure that is usually yours is a document too large for the plan's per-fax page limit. A 60-page contract will not go out on a plan that caps a single fax at 50 pages; split it, or move up a plan.

Should you be faxing this at all?

Often, no. If the recipient will accept an email, email is faster, cheaper and easier to prove. Fax survives where the recipient's process requires it — clinics, courts, insurers, some government offices — and where somebody needs a record of delivery that does not depend on the other side's mail server. Fax or email is the honest version of that decision.