June 8, 2021  |   

If you have just been told that you have to send a fax to someone, you might be struggling, trying to remember how faxes work. Do you need a phone line to send a fax? What if you send a fax from a computer? Do you still need a phone line? With aFax, those old phone landline faxing methods are a thing of the past.

Do I Need a Phone Line to Send a Fax From My Computer?

No! These days, you can easily send a fax directly from your computer by signing up for a third-party fax service. Once you've signed up, you will have your own fax number for sending and receiving fax numbers, and you can even choose the phone number that works best for you. If you're just sending a single fax as a one-time event, you might not care, but if you will fax regularly or have a business, you can get a vanity number, a toll-free number, or a local number.

Once you are signed up, you link your Gmail, Outlook, or Hotmail account to your aFax service, and you are good to go. You can now use your computer, or even a tablet or cell phone, to send a fax as easily as you would send an email. As long as you have an Internet connection and an email account, you don't need a landline or an old fashion fax machine to get this done.

How It Works

You simply open a new email, address it properly, attach your documents, and then let aFax do the work. There's no sitting around, waiting for the busy signal to stop on the other end, and you don't have to worry about whether your fax made it there or not. You can also receive faxes directly to your email without worrying about maintaining a special line or machine.

Addressing Your Fax

To address your fax, you will just need your recipient's fax number and the suffix given to you by your third-party service. You want to remove all special characters and spaces from the fax number you're sending to. That means your number won't look like this: (233) 722-4323. It'll look like this, instead: 2337334323@onafax.com.

If you are sending to an international number, you just need to add the country code for that country and the specific area code, if there is one. There's still no need for any special characters, so don't add a + or anything else you might see in the number you've been given. So, for example, if you're faxing to Mexico City, and your recipient's machine number is 5243 8000, you'll add a 52 and a 55 to that (52 is the country code for Mexico, and 55 is the Mexico City area code). Your final address will look like this: 525552438000@onafax.com.

Attaching Your Documents

Attach the documents you want to send just as if you were attaching them to a normal email. You can attach word documents, PDFs, and just about any other document, but whatever you send will be turned into a PDF. If you want to send images, the best thing to do is to add the images to your own document, create a PDF, and send that. If you want to cover letter, simply type that into your subject line. Then you can hit the send button, and your fax is on its way.

You don't have to wait around for confirmation. You'll get a text from aFax as soon as your fax has been received. It's simple, intuitive, and fast, so try aFax today and see how simple it is to fax using a computer!