When I was first asked that question “What do you think about facsimiles?”, I had nothing good to say about them. In fact, it took me a second to remember that facsimile was the long version of fax! With all the emerging technologies of the twenty-first century, such as email and instant messaging, it's no wonder fax has been type-cast as outdated and old-fashioned. But guess what? Like any old star, the fax machine is getting a face-lift, courtesy of the internet.

In the past, sending a fax could be seen as an involved process. Very few personal users have a fax machine in their home so in order to send a fax they would have to actually go to an establishment that offered a fax machine for their use and pay to send a document. Or even worse, they may have to hand their personal document over to a clerk who would fax it for them.

Even for those people who have a fax machine, there is a lot of work involved. Depending on the type of fax machine, there may be a lot of buttons to push or procedures to follow to get you fax to go out. If you have speed dial set up for those frequent numbers you fax to, you may accidentally send the wrong fax to the wrong person. That can cause quite a bit of trouble and confusion. On top of that, you have to worry about toner, paper, power outages, and maintenance. Problems with any of these things could cause you to miss that important fax.

Online faxing is scarcely more troublesome than regular e-mail, and generally more secure. You can do it with your regular old compter, in fact! You'll need to subscribe to an online fax service to acquire an e-mail address solely for that purpose. Once you have that, you can use the service's provided software or your own software to transform your messages into pdfs and other formats friendly for faxing. It's not significantly different from sending file attachments, which you're probably familiar with. It's just a lot sleeker, safer, and more business-like as a general rule.

Besides reducing time and cost, the software allows the fax to be received as a normal fax – the receiving end will have no idea how it was transmitted. The user needs only to correctly enter the fax number as the email recipient.

Let's say you want a more convenient way to get your faxes rather than send them out, though. Remember what was said about turning the fax into a pdf before sending it? Right, that same process can work for the reader's end too if he wants it that way. With the right service provider, you can turn all incoming faxes from fax machines or computers into pdfs and other file formats that can be read comfortably from your virtual mailbox. It's a lot more private than the old ways, it reduces the necessary number of lines a buisness has to keep open, and perhaps best of all, it cuts down on those expensive ink and paper costs.

Communication technology is a fast-paced area of innovation, and if you don't keep half an eye on things, you could easily find yourself left out of the loop. Don't let yourself be fooled into thinking there's no places for faxes in today's world. In fact, if you're interested in secure communication of medical or financial information, the time for faxing is right here and now, better than ever before.