How to Send and Receive Faxes Online Without a Fax Machine or Phone Line

Some slow-moving businesses and government agencies may not accept documents over email, forcing you to fax them in. If you are forced to send a fax, you can do it from your computer for free.

How Fax Machines Work (and Why They’re So Inconvenient)

This isn’t as easy as it should be. Fax machines are all connected to the plain old telephone lines. When you use a standard fax machine, that fax machine places a phone call to the number you specify. The fax machine at the destination number answers and the document is transmitted over a telephone call.

This process was invented before the Internet and seems laughably archaic at this point. 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. The person receiving the fax may then scan the faxed document and turn it back into a digital file. They’ve come full circle — the document was sent from one computer to another computer with much additional work and lost image quality.

Ideally, you’d be able to submit a document via email or a more secure online method. 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.

There’s no way to connect to a fax machine directly over the Internet, as the fax machine is only connected to telephone lines. 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. That’s where the below services come in. 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.

Send Faxes Online, Free

Most online fax services charge money for subscription plans. These only may make sense if you’re a heavy user.

If you do need to send the occasional fax, we recommend HelloFax. It lets you send five free fax pages per month. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more pages per month than most people have to fax per year. HelloFax will have you covered in the rare case you need to send a fax.

To send a fax with HelloFax, just create an account on the website, upload the document file you want to fax, and enter the fax number you want to send it to. It’s as simple as sending a fax should be in the first place.

HelloFax also offers a 30-day free trial of their more expensive plans, so you could use the trial if you ever needed to send more pages.

If you need to send more than five faxes per month, try FaxZero. It allows you to send up to five three-page faxes per day, entirely free. You don’t even have to create an account. The downside is that there’s an advertisement on the cover page included with the fax. Depending on who you’re sending the fax to, this may or may not be a problem.

Receiving Faxes

If you do need to receive faxes, you’ll have to sign up for a paid service. The service will need to establish a dedicated phone number for your fax line, and that costs money. HelloFax and many other services will do this if you pay.

Luckily, you should at least be able to get a free trial — HelloFax offers 30 days of free fax receiving, for example.