Fax – Fax To Email – Blog

When you receive an faxed letter, it is not coming to you in raw format, but it is converted to a specific file format. Unityfax.com supports both the popular PDF files and TIF images for incoming faxes. It is very easy to switch between the desired format through the administrative panel in the fax management area:

So now we can decide – PDF or TIF? Which one to choose? There is no unified answer. It really depends on what you regularly do with your fax files after you receive them.

PDF files: The “Portable Document Format” was developed by Adobe in 1993. Like its name says it is a very flexible file format, because it can be read cross-platform on any computer with any operating system. In Windows the most popular way to view PDF files is using the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Additionally many other programs do support reading PDF. For the other operating systems – probably all Linux and BSD distributions as well as Mac OSX come with PDF readers available. One example is the Okular software for KDE. Even mobile phones are able to read the documents using free programs like Android PDF viewer or the built-in PDF viewer for iPhone. So briefly, the PDF file format is widely accepted by all systems!

All incoming faxes from UnityFax with PDF configuration are coming in as an “Image Only” format. The version is 1.1, which is a revised edition of the first release of the file format. That means that practically any PDF viewer, regardless how old version it is, will have no problems to read the file. For outgoing faxes PDF is also supported.

TIF images: The “Tagged Image File” is also a cross-platform format too. Initially it was a very popular image format only among Apple Macintosh computers; however later it became frequently used on the PC too. The history of the file format starts from the mid 80′s. Later the format was adopted under the control by Adobe. Now we can say that the TIF is one of the most popular files for transfering images. No major modifications were made to the TIF standard since 1993.

The TIF is actually a file format, not an image file like many people misunderstand initially. One TIF file is actually a container of one or more image files. That way one TIF can have many “pages” of images – just like it is with the PDF file. The image files themselves can use different compression types. UnityFax.com uses the “Group 3″ (aka CCITT FAX3) compression type for incoming documents because it is especially optimized for faxing purposes. This compression preserves the faxed document quality and makes the file size of the TIF file relatively small.

Comparisson: Both the TIF and the PDF files can be read on any computer on any operating system; however the PDF files usually require addtional software to be installed, like the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Windows. The TIF images can be practically read from any photo editor or image viewer software and usually every operating system with graphical interface has such preinstalled. For example Windows comes with the program “Windows Image and Fax Viewer” software. From that viewpoint the TIF files are a little bit more user friendly because they do not require installation of additional software on the computer where you wish to view the files while the PDF files may require installation of PDF viewer if such is not available.

The TIF images have another big advantage over the PDF files – they can be easily imported in graphics editing software and manipulated. It is not that easy to do that with a PDF file. Therefore if you are planing to edit the fax letters, then the TIF format is the better choice. Please note that fax letters can be edited only as images, not text. If you want to edit the fax letters as regular text, then you will need additional OCR (optical character recognition) software.

On the other hand for organization of documents it can be said that the PDF files are more comfortable. The Adobe Acrobat Reader (and other similar PDF viewers) have a much friendlier inteface for reading long multipage documents. They have navigation buttons in the toolbar and you can also scroll down through the pages with scrollbar, the mouse wheel or even with the Page Up/Down and arrow keyboard keys. It is usually not that easy with regular image viewers (that are used for TIF files) – they are usually optimized for single image files and the navigation from one page to another in the TIF file is usually uncomfortable. Here is an example how you can switch pages with “Windows Image and Fax Viewer”:

It is no doubt that the navigation pane of Adobe Acrobat Reader is much more comfortable:

Regarding the file size – you can expect the TIF files slightly smaller than the PDF files. This is because the compression algorithm used in the “Group 3″ TIFs is well optimized for faxes. Also both formats are well supported by most OCR applications. You should not expect any difference in the image quality on the screen between both compared formats.

The verdict: If you are going to just keep backups and read faxes, then the PDF format is the right solution. If you regularily edit the documents with graphical editors, then the TIF file is better and much more comfortable.

Post convert: You may eventually need to convert from the one format to another after you already received the fax letter. Many programs may let you convert PDF to TIF or TIF to PDF files. There are lots of free programs which will let you do that. Use your preferred search engine to find one.

The usual fax to e-mail accounts allows you to receive faxes to only one e-mail address. There are many reasons for you to want your faxes to be forwarded to more than one address, for example:

• You wish to use a secondary e-mail address on different mail server as automatic backup of your fax data;
• You have two people that must process the same fax documents from different viewpoints simultaneously;
• You are out of your office, you do not have access to your company e-mail account and you don’t want to miss important fax letters, so you wish to receive them temporarily on your personal e-mail address.

For all of those cases Unityfax.com provides an easy solution: e-mail aliases. You can add up to three additional e-mail accounts with which you can to receive copies of your faxes. That way UnityFax provides an option that every incoming fax can be dispatched to up to four e-mail addresses (the three aliases + the master user account).

Configuring the aliases is very easy. First you must go to www.unityfax.com and login to the “Manage accounts” area. Once inside you will see a list with your current fax numbers, similar to the following:

Click on the fax number that you wish to manage and you will see it’s “account info” configuration page:

The e-mail address which you specify on this page is your “master user e-mail”. You are able to send and receive faxes using this e-mail address. Additionally using this e-mail address and the corresponding “user password” you are able to login to the “Send/Manage faxes” area on the unityfax.com website.

Now to add additional e-mail addresses, where you will receive copies of your faxes, click on the “Receive aliases” link from the top menu:

On the next page you will see three text boxes. Type the additional addresses in the text boxes and click on the “Update” button:

That’s it – from now on the e-mail aliases will receive copies of your faxes. If you wish to remove an alias later, you have to go back to the same page, delete the address from the text box and click “Update”. Everything is done with only three mouse clicks!

Did you notice that there is also an option called “Send aliases” in the top menu? Yes, you are also able to add additional e-mail address which will be able to send faxes. This is very comfortable if you want to give access to another co-worker to send from your fax number; however you do not wish to give him full access to your account. The “Send Aliases” configuration page looks the same as the “Receive aliases” one and it has the same options to add or delete addresses.

What do e-mail aliases not do? You cannot login to the website using the aliases. Only the master user account has access to the secure storage.

The primarily target of the Internet fax is to function as a “fax to e-mail” service. This not only brings ecological benefits by skipping the tons of wasted paper but also leads to much easier management of the incoming faxes. You can easily separate all your faxes to different folders of your e-mail client or you can download them as files to your local computer. That way the organization of data is much simpler than searching through hundreds of lists of paper.

Choosing the Internet fax service to replace the regular “paper fax” gives many benefits but also brings new responsibilities. What about the security of your faxes? It’s not impossible; however very rare situation to really loose a paper fax. On the other side the electronic faxes can be deleted and lost with a single press on the delete button on the keyboard. A crash on the mail exchange server in your office can lead to loosing all your e-mails, including the faxes. This means that keeping a secure backup of your faxes is a must!

Making secure backups of faxes can be very expensive for small office and requires qualified staff for management of the servers. For that reason people usually keep their faxes both on their e-mail servers and as local copies on their hard drive. That way the faxes are kept in two locations and the information can be recovered even if one of the computer systems crashes. Unityfax.com is a leading fax to e-mail provider that helps you to improve your backups one step further. There is an option for keeping all recent faxes on a secure location called “secure storage”. This is a special password protected area on servers with high quality hardware and maintained by qualified administrators in the Unityfax data-center. These faxes can be easily accessed from the users (after authentication) through the web with a browser. It has a web interface which helps you to browse, download and read your faxes sorted in folders by date:

It provides a useful “Search” function which helps you to find faxes. For flexibility you are also able to manage the names of the folders, add new folders and move faxes from one folder to another:

The secure storage area on the Unityfax servers is also a very flexible alternative way to manage faxes; however we would like to seriously note that it is primarily intended to be a “backup of recent faxes” and not a “permanent storage”. Even if you choose to use the secure storage instead of e-mail (this is not unusual and many Unityfax customers prefer it) you must know that you should keep a copy of your faxes in your e-mail or/and on your local hard drive too! There are different short and long term storage solutions that allow you to recover your faxes from the secure website; however in all of them you should know – older faxes are permanently removed from the server. The current (by January 2011) secure storage options are the following:

1. 30 days – This is the default selection which is automatically included with all fax accounts. The faxes received in the last 30 days can be recovered through the website. Faxes older than 30 days are removed;
2. 6 months – This is the most popular option that gives 6 months of secure storage.  If you need more than 30 days of storage, but long term storage is not necessary, this is your best option.  You can recover any faxes that you have received in the last 180 days;
3. 12 months – The faxes from the last 365 days can be recovered with this option. This can be useful for organizations which maintain their documentation on an annual basis;
4. 24 months – For those who require long term secure storage and want to ensure their faxes are recoverable for 2 years after they have been received, this is the best option.

Everyone’s requirements are slightly different and the secure storage choices have been designed to accommodate these needs. Of course there is also an option to disable the secure storage. That way the faxes will be sent only by e-mail and there will be no files stored on the Unityfax servers at all. This can be done from the administrative control panel with a simple check-box:

As you can see the Unityfax secure storage option is a flexible way for both backup and fax management. It is very easy to use and it can be accessed from different locations with a simple web browser. This is an additional benefit for people who do not use web-based e-mails and may not have access to their e-mail all the time.