You’d also need a landline telephone connection and you’d have to tell people to stay off the phone when you’re sending faxes, just like in the old dial-up Internet days. The catch is that you’d need your computer connected to the phone line - yes, this means that you’d need a dial-up fax modem. Microsoft Windows even contains a Fax and Scan application that allows you to send faxes. You could skip the below services, of course. You Could Fax With Just Your Computer, But… Give them a document and they’ll do the annoying work of dialing up the fax machine and sending your document over the telephone line. To perform a fax online, we’ll need some sort of gateway that accepts documents via the Internet and transmits the document to a fax machine. There’s no way to connect to a fax machine directly over the Internet, as the fax machine is only connected to telephone lines. Many businesses consider fax a secure method of transmitting documents, but it really isn’t - if someone was snooping on the phone line, they could easily intercept all the faxed documents. Ideally, you’d be able to submit a document via email or a more secure online method. RELATED: How to Electronically Sign PDF Documents Without Printing and Scanning Them They’ve come full circle - the document was sent from one computer to another computer with much additional work and lost image quality. The person receiving the fax may then scan the faxed document and turn it back into a digital file. To perform a fax, a person may type up a document, print it out, and scan it into the fax machine which sends it over the phone line. This process was invented before the Internet and seems laughably archaic at this point. The fax machine at the destination number answers and the document is transmitted over a telephone call.

When you use a standard fax machine, that fax machine places a phone call to the number you specify. Fax machines are all connected to the plain old telephone lines. How Fax Machines Work (and Why They’re So Inconvenient) With this process, you can digitally sign a document and fax it to a business - all on your computer and without any printing required. We’ve previously covered ways to electronically sign documents without printing and scanning them. If you are forced to send a fax, you can do it from your computer for free. Some slow-moving businesses and government agencies may not accept documents over email, forcing you to fax them in.

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