I seldom send faxes, but occasionally that’s the only way to communicate, as I mentioned in The quest for a magic incantation. In the past I’ve visited the Post Office, but recently when I had to send off 3 pages to Puerto Rico that option failed me.
The first Post Office I visited didn’t offer that service. The second and third happened to have no suitably nearby parking when I was in the vicinity.
I figured there must be an online solution, and there is — PayPerFax:
Pay Per Fax is an online faxing service that allows you to send and receive faxes from your computer at a per page price. No monthly fees!
After some Googling I’d found several services that required a monthly fee. That was no good to me as I send faxes only maybe once per year, so a per page fee was what I needed.
I signed up, scanned in my three pages and was ready to go.
First up I struck a glitch: I was sending to Puerto Rico and had chosen that destination in a drop-down menu. The confirmation screen before sending showed the destination as Andorra!
I emailed the Help Desk. A very prompt reply assured me that this was a temporary glitch and the Helpdesk would ensure my fax reached the correct recipient.
Happy with that I clicked the Send Fax button. Some prominent red text warned me that sending may take a few moments and I shouldn’t click the Back button. I switched to Preview and read some of an ebook.
Maybe 10 minutes later Safari came back with a huge Server error page. Presumably my fax had not been sent.
I sent off another email to the Helpdesk, but by then I suspect office hours were over; a reply came around 18 hours later.
In the meanwhile I tried again with a couple of different web browsers. In each case I stopped it after 10 or 15 minutes when the fax clearly wasn’t going through.
Once the Helpdesk did reply, they wrote:
Your fax has been successfully sent. In the future you don’t need to add the + symbol for US numbers. You can just put in the area code and phone number. We appreciate your patience and business
So, my mistake. But maybe their system should check for that kind of thing. It’s confusing for us foreigners, especially since Puerto Rico is apparently not a country in its own right, as I thought, but:
a self-governing unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeastern Caribbean
[Via : Puerto Rico - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.]
So, subtract one point from my knowledge of geography.
Overall , in spite of the glitches, I have to say that the service worked well. The Helpdesk responses were prompt(ish) and very friendly. The couple of dollars it cost to send my 3 pages of fax were comparable to, or even cheaper than, going to the Post Office. It was certainly easy to scan in the files (or create a PDF direct from files on the computer) and upload them.
The next time I have to fax something I’ll turn to Pay Per Fax first.
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I don’t even have a scanner, let alone a working FAXmodem. So I just put whatever on the floor and stand over it with my camera zoomed appropriately (about 100 mm focal length lens for an A4 sheet) and then crop and/or rotate a little in iPhoto. If it’s a pure black&white document and I can be bothered then I’ll also cut the saturation to zero and adjust the curves to drive bare paper to pure white and solid text to pure black leaving gray only around the edges.
A real FAX is superfine mode is about 4 megapixels for an A4 page, but those are only 1-bit pixels, so even a 2 MP colour camera is plenty (e.g. iPhone), but you do preferably want to have a zoom so you can get far enough back to minimize distortion.
Thanks Bruce.
At a pinch one could also use a built-in iSight camera, I guess.
Cheers,
Miraz
There’s a song in “West Side Story” that goes……
“Immigrant goes to America
Many hellos in America
Nobody knows in America
Puerto Rico’s in America.” – so you’re not the only one!
Why fax? Why not just email? There are close to 1,000,000 Puerto Ricans listed in Facebook as belonging to the PR Network. There are 4,000,000 PRicans on the island. Even if they don’t have email, their neighbor will. How were you communicating with the person?
I am also surprised your PO “…The first Post Office I visited didn’t offer that service…” If they send items to the US, they will send to PR. Make sure you use the right zip code in same format you use for USA xxxxx-xxxx (last 4 optional)
Edward, I’m glad the people in Puerto Rico are big on email and also networks such as Facebook.
I only wish the Taxpayer Advocate’s office would allow me to use email. Unfortunately my choices were snail mail or fax, so I chose fax.
The first Post Office I asked to send a fax for me just didn’t offer faxing as a service. They would have happily sent a regular letter.
Cheers,
Miraz
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