I need to receive a fax, but don’t have a fax machine. Is there anywhere where I can do this on the Internet? I only need to do this once, so don’t really want to sign up for anything expensive.

A friend of mine needed to receive a fax from a company that does life insurance for kids, but didn’t really have access to a fax machine (does anyone still use these?). There are a number of places online that let you receive faxes, but he was particularly interested in a free service as he couldn’t really see when he would use this again.

Well, there is a free service around being offered by a company called eFax. Now, if you try to go to the company’s home page, they will try and get you signed up for one of their “Paid-For” services, but if you go to this page, you will be able to sign up for their free service. The free service only lets you receive 20 faxes per month, but this was plenty for my friend. Let’s walk through the process of setting up an account:

The first step is to fill in the form. The most important part of this is the first field, which country would you like your receiving fax number in. Once this is done, click the red button at the bottom of the form.

The site will then try to persuade you to upgrade to one of the paid-for services. eFaxPlus lets you choose your fax number, as opposed to the free service’s preassigned number. Click “Continue” and then “Submit”

The site will get you to check your email at this point. You should have an activation email waiting for you which just needs you to click a link to activate your service. (You’ll notice that once again they encourage you to try their “paid-for” service)

Once you click the link, you’ll be given a phone number for your incoming faxes and sent an email with similar information. Any fax sent to that number will now be automatically forwarded to your email account.

So, get faxing ..