About the difficulties of finding a good Mail2Fax service
Actually, I had thought that Mail2Fax services should be a dime a dozen. There are also services, just not those that you can really seriously use. The use case: I have a signed document that I have to fax to a company. I can scan this and then save it as a PDF on my computer. I could also scan my signature and put it in a document and then create a PDF from it. The second option doesn’t really look good, and I don’t have time to take care of it. In the next step, I would like to put this PDF file in an email and send it to a Mail2Fax gateway, which sends the file as a fax to the fax number given in the subject or elsewhere, in the best case with a header that contains my fax number and my name. Shouldn’t be that hard. I also don’t want to pay for it monthly, but only per fax, because sometimes I don’t send a fax for months. It all sounds very simple, doesn’t it? My first thought was web.de. In fact, you can send a fax there from the web interface, but unfortunately you can’t attach any documents. Deceased. Then I thought of the Unified Messaging of Puretec/Schlund & Partner/1&1/United Internet, after all, this was the buzzword that was always printed in bold in their colorful brochures that tumbled out of every computer newspaper. Although web.de is now a subsidiary of United Internet, I still had the hope that the services had not yet been consolidated and that there would be another product at Puretec/1&1. In fact, something like this is offered, but not in my expensive hosting plan. Only if I also took DSL, then I could use the Mail2Fax gateway. As it is, however, I can only send a fax from a web interface. If you click on one of the many advertising links on a search engine after the search “mail2fax”, you will usually only find services that cash in monthly. It was only after some time that I found an offer that requires a set-up fee of a few euros, but then only charges per fax; the provider is called Xaranet. Although access is apparently only activated after a slow bank transfer and is not for spontaneous decision-makers, the money is not transferred to an account in the Bahamas, but to that of a German GmbH. The managing director, Timo Dreger, not only answers support emails personally, but also writes his own company blog. There were some small teething problems, but once I understood the principle, I can finally send faxes without having to buy a machine or apply for a second line. Interesting that there is no Web 2.0 solution yet, something like DropSend for faxes; Some time ago I thought that faxes were a dying species, but some things just can’t be solved with e-mail or Skype yet. This makes it all the more surprising that there are so few providers.