Andrew said:
Hi,
Does anyone know of a way to create a web form where the form is sent to a
predetermined fax number rather than to an email address?
Preferably a free service if possible.
You can either do this yourself (setting up your own fax server with fax
modem and appropriate software) or go with a 3rd party solution.
If you do it yourself its not that hard to do, but you do need to set up the
software and you'll be paying for the phone line each month (plus any long
distance) so you have to look at how many faxes you are sending per month
and can divide the cost per month by that and find out how much the faxing
will cost you.
IE: If your phone line is $25/mo and you are sending out 500 faxes a month
(locally) then you are looking at a cost of 5 cents per fax.
A few issues in doing this:
- If the fax modem (or one of the modems) fails then you need to replace it,
otherwise you aren't faxing
- If there is alot of long distance faxing then you have to add that cost to
your phone bill... phone companies usually charge rounded up to the next
full minute, so if your fax takes 1 minute and 10 seconds, you will be
billed 2 minutes of long distance calling
- If you use your own server then you have to maintain it... going out of
town? then you need some way to make sure its working and reboot if
necessary
- You are limited by the number of lines you have... if you are planning on
doing 500 faxes a day then with 1 phone line you'll end up getting a long
queue going and it could take 5-7 hours for the 500th fax to go through
The alternative is to go with a 3rd party solution and have them do the
faxing for you. This will pretty much alleviate all of the issues above,
but you usually have to pay. There are a few services out that that will
fax for free but then they usually:
- limit how many times a day you can use the service
- send an ad along with your fax (this can look unprofessional and uses up
the recipients fax paper)
- record the fax number(s) you are sending to and add them to their fax
database (and then sell the phone numbers to other people or use them
themselves to send faxes to your recipient)
- free faxes are low priority... your fax could take 5 minutes to be sent...
or 2 or more days (so if this is a priority that the faxes go out in a
timely fashion you won't be able to use them becuz they won't guarantee
anything)
Going with a faxing service is probably the best solution if you want this
for a website and/or need to send the faxes out regularly... usually you pay
$5-10 per month and get a certain number of "free" faxes included in that
and then pay anywhere from 5 to 25 cents per additional fax after that.
These are usualyl easy to use as well... you just have your website send an
email or file attachment to an email address the company gives you and they
receive and send your fax out (usually in 30-60 seconds and are able to
handle tens or hundreds of thousands of faxes simultaneously - note: some
fax services also have an IPN service available and can accept xml for
templates too)
Two fax services I can think of are Protus IP (
www.protus.com) and Data On
Call (
www.dataoncall.com). For my restaurant online ordering website I use
Data On Call to handle the faxing and can say they are very reliable and
able to meet our demands (we use Protus to handle company inbound and
outbound faxing, not restaurant orders).
Clint
