Fax – Fax To Email – Blog

The name of the technology “fax” is shortened from “facsimile” which means “an exact copy”. This is exactly what it is used for – to make copies of documents and send them remotely through a telephone line. The document, which is going to be sent is scanned, the image is then separated in rows (around 1mm which is about 1/25 inches) and every line is separated in dots. At the output of the scanner we receive electrical signals which are proportional of the coefficient of the reflection of every dot. These signals are sent to a modem (MOdulator-DEModulator) which is transferring them as a sequence of modulated signals. These signals are sent over a phone line and received by another modem on the other side of the connection. The receiving modem is demodulating the signals and the image is restored using a printing device.

Fax machines are like copy machines where the scanning and printing  engine are separated from each other and communicate via telephone lines. There are various models of fax machines with different qualities and features. They alll communicate through strict fax standards, which is how they are able understand each other.

Usually the biggest difference in fax machines is the printing device. In the early days of the fax machine, the most popular method was thermal paper. The construction of such printing device is very simple and they are very economical. The shortcomings are that the paper itself is expensive and it fades relatively fast with time, so it’s not very suitable for long term storage.   As Inkjet and Laser printers became the printing device of choice, they replaced thermal paper.

The protocols of fax transmission and that of modems over telephone line are very similar to each other. This made possible the invention of the “fax modem” which are devices which demodulate fax signals and transfers them through a computer.  The computer can then take the fax, save it as a digital document (TIFF, PDF, etc.), or alternatively, print it through one of its printers.  In this setup, a computer can work like a typical fax machine.

The fax to e-mail services work similarly – a fax modem demodulates the fax signal, it is converted to a digital document, and than attached to an e-mail. The advantage of this process is that it is up to the recipient if they wish to print the file or store it.

With today’s technology it is very easy to integrate microcomputers into fax machines. Multifunctional machines are now very common. They integrate fax, copy machine, printer and scanner - all in one device.

In 1987 the ITU-T defined the standard T.6 for the fax machines known as “Group 4″. This standard is completely new and it has no backwards compatibility with “Group 3″ and therefore is not able to work over regular phone lines. The new machines require high speed ISDN lines. The speed of transmission is 64kbit/sec. The resolutions are 200, 300 or 400 dpi. Color faxes are also possible!

The scanning of the image is completely digital, while the previous groups were all analogue. The image is raster (made of dots). During the transmission the data is compressed. The “Group 4″ standard supports two-dimensional image compression – across the line width as well as the line length. These lines can achieve compression ratios of 15:1 for office documents and 20:1 for graphics with a resolution of 400 dpi.

The errors during transmission are NOT corrected. The “broken” lines are either skipped by the recipient or they are printed “as they came”. Usually if the line is good the errors are very rare and they are not critical for the image quality.

There are three classes of “Group 4″ machines. The “Class 1″ machines can only receive and send fax letters. The “Class 2″ machines are capable of receiving “telexes” and “mixed mode” (text and raster) data. The “Class 3″ machines can send and receive letters from any type.

During the 90s and the last 10 years the statistics show that “Group 4″ is still not very popular. It looks like ”Group 3″ machines are still suiting the needs of most people.

More information for the fax standards can be found in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax#Digital

A “junk fax” is any material sent over a fax line to any person without his prior permission and which usually advertises commercial goods or services. The “junk faxing” was very popular in the 80s and the beginning of the 90s. Even though it is not as common today (e-mail spam is much more cost ineffective for the spammers) it is still used as a way to advertise by some people.

In 2005 the US Congress changed the “junk fax law” and allowed companies with an “established business relationship” to send advertisements [1]. This means that these companies are able to legally send advertisements to your fax number, unless you explicitly ask them to stop. Of course “telling them to stop” is usually inconvenient because it normally requires you to send a fax letter back to the sending number, which consumes time and resources, which inevitably costs money.

Receiving a “junk fax” on a regular fax machine is very disturbing because it prints a hard copy of the advertisement. It wastes paper, ink cartridges and time. If you are using an Internet fax account (like the plans from Unityfax.com), then “getting rid” of the junk faxes is much more easier. You receive the faxes as e-mail attachments in your e-mail. Therefore they are not wasting ink and paper and additionally they are easily deleted within your e-mail client. That being said, we can say that dealing with “junk faxes” is not much different than dealing with normal spam e-mails. In some cases however, particular companies may be repeatedly sending you junk faxes.

Unityfax provides an option to stop junk faxes by blocking the originating phone number. This is easily done through the administrative control panel:

You just have to type the phone number in the text box and click on the “Add New Record” button.   The UnityFax.com system will block faxes coming from this number to yours.

Additionally you have an option to “Block All Calls with Unknown CallerID”. This is really helpful against most junk faxes (they usually do not use callerID at all); however this should be used with extra attention because you may block legitimate faxes too. If you work with repeated fax correspondence with known people/companies and you do not expect to receive faxes from unknown third-party, then this option will substantially reduce unwanted faxes.

Related articles:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_fax

The Group 3 fax machines are the first to use digital standards.  Most fax machines today are digital.

The digital machines look at the image as a set of discrete elements called pixels. The documents are commonly viewed in black and whites and therefore every pixel can be black (binary one) or white (binary zero). That way the digital transformation of a paper document to a fax letter results in binary code and the fax data transmission speed is measured in “bits per second”. Additionally the fax data of the image can be compressed which speeds up the transfer. After the data is transferred the recipient can use error checking algorithms to minimize any data loss during transmission. The digital signals increased the speed and quality of the data transmission. They also made the sending of complicated graphics possible.

The Group 3 fax standard is defined by the recommendation ITU-T T.4 in 1980. At the beginning the first modems were “V.27 ter”. They transfer the signal with just 2400 or maximum 4800 bits/second. This standard was later modified twice – in 1984 and 1988. The modem standards did increase to V.29 by 7200 or 9600 bits/second. The revision of the standard from 1990 includes the modems standard V.33 in which the coding schemes of the Group 4 fax standards are approved. In the middle of the 90s the modems V.34 were adopted and the speed of transmission was increased up to 33600 bits/second. A feature for lowering the transfer rate in case of sudden bad quality on the connection was added as an additional feature.

The Group 3 standard provides two levels of quality – Standard and Fine. The difference is the number of vertical dots per page – 100 for standard and 200 for fine mode.

UPDATE: Starting from October 2011 Unityfax is using a new domain for sending faxes – RouteFax.com. The article below references to “FaxORama.com”, which is our old domain. The article is still valid as the sending procedure remains the same – the only difference is that the new domain should be used from now on.

Sending a fax letter by e-mail – is that easy enough? We know that using the regular fax machine is simple – you must prepare a document, print it, then put the printed paper list in the fax machine, dial the number of the recipient, hit “send” and wait to see on the machine display if it is delivered properly. What about the “e-faxes”? Are they complicated or not?

We will now show an example of sending a fax letter by e-mail. This process is invariant of the e-mail client (the software which you use to send e-mail) but for the example purpose we will show how it is done using “Outlook Express”. This program is coming for free with Windows and it is one of the popular e-mail clients. Sending using other clients (like the web software clients from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) is not much different. In our example the e-fax service will be from unityfax.com and it’s interface for sending faxes.

First open your e-mail client and click on the “Create e-mail” button to compose a new message:

After that you must type the e-mail address where the message will be sent. The required format is <number>@faxorama.com (where you replace <number> with the actual 10 digits number of the recipient). In our example case we want to fax a letter to 954736318, so the e-mail address is 954736318@faxorama.com:

Whatever you write in the body of the e-mail message will be sent to the recipient as a fax page. If the body of the e-mail message is left blank, then this page will not be sent. The next step is to include the actual fax letter in the e-mail message. What you must do is to attach the file that needs to be faxed. Click on the “Attach file” button and choose the file that you wish to fax out (in our example we will use a PDF file):

The other available formats are DOC, DOCX (Word files), BMP, TIFF, JPG and other images. If you want more than one document to be faxed, then repeat with attaching a second file. Finally, when you are ready to send the fax letter, you have to hit the “Send” button:

After sending your e-mail message (fax letter) is delivered to the fax server. What is left to do now is to verify it and approve it. For that reason you will receive an e-mail from support@faxorama.com with the following content:

Now all you have to do is to click on the link in the e-mail to approve the sending (this is important security measure which will prevent spammers). Your default web browser will open and you will see a webpage similar to this one:

On this page you see the fax letter id (it can be used for eventual tracking from the support department). From now on all you have to do is to wait. In no longer than few minutes (depending on the fax letter size) you will receive an e-mail back with status report. Normally (if everything was sent properly) it will state that your fax letter is successfully delivered to the recipient:

That’s it! The fax letter is succesfuly sent! Sending of fax letters by e-mail is simple and can be done from any computer at any time. The e-mail software that composes the letter does not matter – it can be desktop or web e-mail client or even a smartphone/GSM. Therefore the sending is very flexible and mobile and it does not require that you should be physically in your office.