Fax – Fax To Email – Blog

People will frequently choose a new service provider, either due to more compelling offers,  or service reasons.   With fax services, it is no different.  If you have a fax number with another company, you can easily switch to UnityFax in order to take advantage of our fax-to-email services.  Porting allows you to keep your existing number, so it is not necessary to obtain a new one.  Your customers will not have to learn a new number, and you will not need to update or obtain new business collateral, ie. letterhead, business cards, etc.   So how do you transfer a fax number from one company to another?

The process of transferring a number from one provider to another is typically referred to as “porting”.   It is defined by the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC‘s).   UnityFax fully satisfies and follows the porting regulations, which includes the following:

• You must keep your number active with your existing service provider during the whole process. Therefore it is important that you DO NOT terminate your account until you receive confirmation that the number has been transferred;
• Open a new account with UnityFax where a temporarily number is assigned to you.  That number will later be swapped out and replaced by your ported number;
• Hand sign and fax (or scan and e-mail) to UnityFax a letter (use our authorization template) in which you request to port your number from your existing provider to UnityFax;
• The UnityFax support department will initiate the porting process on your behalf;
• Within several days UnityFax will receive approval or denial for the porting request. If everything is ok, the number will be ported to UnityFax and you can begin using our service.

The porting process is virtually transparent, with minimal or no downtime. The re-routing from your existing provider to UnityFax should not take more than a few minutes on the day it is scheduled to complete.

Please visit the UnityFax porting instructions page to download and view full instructions, which also includes an authorization template.

If you are not committed to porting your number initially, many people choose to forward their existing fax number to one of our numbers.   This allows them to keep their phone line for other outbound calls/faxes, but all their inbound fax calls will be automatically routed to the fax to email system.  Once you become confident with the system, you can then port your number.

Did you ever wonder how to backup your important files and have access to them from anywhere at the same time? Unityfax.com now offers another great new service, “Secure Storage”. It is similar to Secure Storage for Faxes – your important faxes are stored securely (password protected) on the server; however it is even more powerful as you can save any file type to it.

The new “Secure Storage” service is actually a web hard drive. Using the “Network Places” in Windows you are able to map the hard drive and connect remotely to the server. After you do that a new hard drive will appear in the “My Computer” next to the other local devices. You can browse the network hard drive, create folders, copy and paste files just how you are used to doing it on your local drives.

To start you must go to the Unityfax.com website and sign-up for a storage account. You will be given a username and password with which you can then login with at JumpSOS.com (this website is an alternative interface which will let you to download files with read-only access from your web hard drive). Next you can view a full tutorial regarding how to map your secure storage web hard drive at the following page:

http://www.jumpsos.com/shared/Map_Drive_XP.html

If you any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Unityfax.com support department. We will be happy to receive your questions or comments.

Internet faxing offers big advantages and is very convenient in comparison to traditional fax machines; however it brings additional questions and possible obstacles that did not seem to exist before. One of those new problems is security. The traditional fax transmission can be considered “relatively secure” – the fax letter would generally follow this communication path: “sender machine -> sender telecom provider > recipient telecom provider > recipient machine”. We assume a certain level of trust with our telecom providers to not allow “information leaks” and normally they will not store anything except the traffic logs (who called who at specific times). 

How does it work with the Internet?

The fax to e-mail and e-mail to fax solutions have “extra steps” in the delivery process. For example if you are sending from a fax to e-mail service to a regular fax number, then the process is similar to the following: “sender  e-mail client -> sender e-mail server -> routing of the e-mail to the fax to e-mail server -> fax to e-mail server ->  telecom provider of the server -> recipient telecom provider -> recipient fax machine”. The receiving process is usually the same in the opposite direction. That are part of the communication path that should receive special attention is on the “routing of the e-mail to the fax to e-mail server”, since this includes many interconnects (routers, switches, etc.) that are transparent to both the sender and receiver.  We must be sure that nobody in is “sniffing” or altering this traffic.

The solution for the privacy of this information during the transmission between the sender of the e-mail and the Internet fax server (and vice versa) is the encryption of the information through TLS (transport layer security). The UnityFax.com e-mail servers do support TLS encryption and it is always enabled if the client supports it. This means that even if someone tried to sniff the traffic information, they would only see encrypted data, which is not useful.  If the client e-mail service is secure, it would provide a secure path between the  ”sender e-mail client -> fax to e-mail server”.

As soon as the e-mail is securely delivered to the fax to e-mail server, then it is converted to a fax letter and sent through a fax modem to the recipient machine with the help of telecom providers.  This provides a secure path similar to traditional faxing.

An alternative to using secure email is using a secure website.  By connecting to our SSL (secure socket layer) website, you bypass the whole email system and have direct secure access to our servers for both the sending and receiving of faxes.

UnityFax also provides a secure fax storage service. Unlike traditional fax communications (where the telecom providers only keep the traffic logs but not the transmitted data) the secure storage can keep copy of your inbound faxes so that you can recover them if needed. 

The UnityFax.com secure storage service is completely secure and is using a trusted SSL certificate issuer:

For fax letters which include very sensitive information, we provide an additional option to prevent storage:

Conclusion: Internet faxing should be consider secure if the proper methods are employed.

Sometimes you may encounter a situation when you have a paper document which you need to keep as an electronic copy and you do not have a document scanner nearby. This can become a hassle if you have to deal with these documents often. If however, you have a fax to e-mail account, then this is no longer a problem – you can easily scan your documents by sending a fax letter to your fax to e-mail number! The faxed documents will automatically appear as a digital PDF file in your email.

Even if you have a scanner it is not as easy and fast as it is to scan documents using a fax machine, especially if you have to use other peoples computers. You must scan the document in raw format to the computer software using the scanner. After that you must convert the scanned copy to specific format (like gif, png or jpeg) because the raw file size is usually very big and uncomfortable. Finally you have to send the document as attachment to your e-mail address, therefore Internet connection is required and if you do not use your personal computer – access to other peoples e-mail address too.

If you have an Internet fax number account, then scanning documents is very easy if you have access to a normal fax machine. All you have to do is to send the document to your fax to e-mail number and… that’s it. As soon as you send the fax, it will be converted to PDF or image file by the fax server and you will have it automatically sent to your e-mail almost immediately. This is very simple and fast way to accomplish the scan.

Increased resolution can also be obtained by sending the fax in fine, superfine or ultrafine mode.

Let’s briefly compare:

1. Using scanner (high quality color scans are possible):

• Scan the document;
• Convert it by some photo editing software to proper file format;
• Access Internet and to e-mail account from which you can send out in particular;
• Compose an e-mail to yourself with the file attached.

2. Using fax machine (commonly non-color and lower resolutions):

• Just send the document to your fax to e-mail number and you will have the document in your e-mail inbox. No computer and internet connection required!

Conclusion: Scanning documents by sending a fax to your fax to e-mail number is a very convenient way to scan regular text documents. It is much faster and simpler than using scanners and therefore it saves time and it is more comfortable. This is the only way to scan a document in electronic copy on places where no Internet connection is available and you have a fax machine. It is much more practical and environment-friendly than making a paper copy on copier too.