Telstra finally increased the line rental price one too many times. At $30/month, it was not worth the expense of keeping a separate Fax line, even though my ADSL ran over that line. So after a few months switching over my ADSL (the net result of which will mean I will be paying a fifth the price for five times the bandwidth!), it was time to cancel my Fax landline and find a Fax to email (Fax2Email) gateway instead.
A quick trip to Google Australia, search for “Internet Fax”, restricted to Australian sites, and paying close attention to sponsored links and reviews, lead to a number of potential services:
My requirements were fairly simple, I wanted an Australian number, preferably Perth, with minimal monthly cost as I receive a very low number of faxes, sent directly to my email account.
Tri-Tel was $24.95/month, so that was too expensive. eFax was free for non-Australian numbers, which might be interesting to some of you, but was $18/month (US? GST?) for an Australian number, so that was pretty rich too.
mBox looks very nice at $9.95/month. At the time it was not clear on their site that the Fax was emailed directly to you and that you did not have to use Webmail or POP from their site to get your Fax, however they have since updated their site to make it clear that it can directly email your faxes. They now also offer a 14 day free trial and a test fax page so you can verify that their system will work with your email client.
In the end, I went with Ozefax, $8.80/month for 30 minutes of inbound calls (roughly 50 Fax pages). They answered a support question very promptly, and so far I’ve left the voice mail service active even though I don’t really need it. It would be nice if their web site offered a test Fax email with a two or three page sample Fax and a short voice mail message so potential customers could see what they would recieve and verify that everything works. It would also be nice if they offered online management of your account (receive formats, services, and email addresses).
There looks to be very little separating mBox and Ozefax - mBox is slightly more expensive, but their site and facilities look much cleaner.
Since starting with Ozefax, I have received a handful of faxes, and while the quality is pretty poor, it is a fax after all, and the faxes are readable, so I'm fairly happy with the service - and it is saving me around $300/year in Telstra line rental.
Written: 2006-01-13