Free fax to e-mail service

While browsing the blogs of various colleagues, I ran into an interesting note from Céline Graciet mentioning her use of a free fax to e-mail service as part of a planned move to the UK. I followed the link out of curiosity and decided to give it a try. Signing up took a few minutes, then I was give a local telephone number to use for receiving faxes. However, the web page that communicated this information didn't say where it was local. My best guess was somewhere in the UK, so I tried faxing from my real landline fax number, adding the +44 prefix to the number from the web page.

It worked. In just a few minutes I could see TIFF files for the faxes on the account area on the web site. A few minutes later I received copies of the faxes as e-mail attachments.

I haven't looked into the security issues with the site yet; I'll probably be appalled when I do. Maybe not. It's an interesting application and one for which I can see some integration possibilities with other applications I use, such as LSP.net's Online Translation Manager. I can see this being useful when I'm travelling or to save me the trouble of re-scanning faxes for OCR purposes. I used to use a fax modem many years ago for similar reasons, but faxes have become such a rare thing in my business over the past decade that I haven't bothered about such solutions in a long time.