How Does E-Fax Work? What Are Hosted Fax Solutions?

The first thing you have to know about how E-Fax works is that it uses the same technology as traditional fax transmission, but through a web interface instead of the lifelong fax machine. It turns out to be a flexible and economical option to send and receive fax at this time where companies are focused on digital transformation. Electronic faxing services generally assign a number to each person who has signed up for the hosted fax solutions so that people can send faxes to a virtual number. When it comes to hosted fax, you can send faxes by email without using a machine of traditional faxing.

To send a fax through an E-fax service

The sender attaches a document to an email message. That is the document that will be sent as a Fax. It can be a scan of a paper document, or it can be a digitally created document in different formats. The sender directs the message to the recipient's fax number, followed by the name of the fax service. 

• The hosted fax solution processes the attached file to be sent and received by the recipient as a Fax.
• The service sends the data through the telephone line.
• The recipient's fax machine decodes the data and receives it according to the service in use.
• The sender sends the fax to the recipient's Fax number.
• The hosted fax solution receives the fax, processes it in an image file and sends the image to the email address of the recipient where the address is defined. 
• The recipient opens the email, downloads the attached file and sees the fax that has been sent to him.

How do traditional fax machines work?

Today you can access almost any company, big or small, from any industry, and you will find a fax machine. Of course, it is connected to a standard telephone line, a fax machine allows you to transmit sheets of paper to another person who has a fax machine. Although technology has advanced, it is almost impossible to do business without one of these machines today.

The First Fax machines

Fax machines have existed in one form or another for more than a century: Alexander Bain patented the first fax design in 1843. If you examine some of the first designs, you can get an excellent idea of ​​how they work today. Most of the first designs of fax machines included a rotating drum. To send a fax, you had to attach the sheet of paper to the drum, with the printout. The rest of the machine worked something like this:

• There was a small photographic sensor with a lens and a light.
• The photographic sensor was attached to one arm and faced the sheet of paper.
• The arm could move down on the sheet of paper from one end to the other as the blade rotated in the drum.
• In other words, something like a lathe worked.

Modern fax machines

An advanced fax machine has no rotating drums and is much faster, but uses the same basic mechanisms to do the job:

• At the carriage end, there is some sensor to read the document. Generally, a modern fax machine also has a paper feed mechanism to make it easy to send multi-page faxes.
• There is a standard way to encode the black and white dots that the fax machine sees on paper so that they can travel through a telephone line.
• At the receiving end, there is a mechanism that marks the paper with black dots.

 There are five common ways to print the fax, depending on the type of machine that receives it:

Thermal paper:

When fax machines began to infiltrate offices in 1980, thermal paper was mostly used. The paper is covered with chemicals that react to heat turning black. Thermal paper has several great advantages:

• It is very cheap to build a thermal printer.
• Thermal printers have no moving parts, except for the paper feed mechanism.
• There are no consumables such as ink or ribbons because the paper contains the ink.
• Thermal printers are almost indestructible.
• The only disadvantage is that the paper fades over time. It also turns utterly black if you leave it in a warm place, like a car.

Thermal film:

The thermal film uses a tape that contains ink that melts on paper when it is heated. This is more mechanically complicated than thermal paper but less complicated than an inkjet.

Inkjet: 

This technique uses the same mechanism as an inkjet printer.

Laser printer: 

This technique uses the same mechanism as a laser printer.

Computer printer:

The fax is received by a fax modem, stored on the computer's hard drive as a graphics file and then sent to the usual computer printer.

How do hosted fax solutions work to send or receive the fax from the Internet?

Nowadays, traditional fax machines are quickly being replaced by hosted fax services and solutions to send and receive e-fax. However, it is still essential to know how it works. When you hire hosted Fax service or solution, you can post or receive faxes from the Internet, without making significant investments in equipment, maintenance or consumables. Hosted fax solutions are hired as a service, and you will pay according to the volume of faxes that you require in your business.

The benefits of a Hosted Fax solution are:

• Cost and space savings: no traditional fax machine, telephone line, paper, toner or power consumption.
• Security and traceability: Guarantees sending, receiving and archiving of your documents with security and traceability. 
• Send and receive faxes by email or any web browser.
• Multiple formats for sending and receiving: Microsoft Office, Txt, Pdf, Tif, Jpeg, Html, Png, Etc.
• Delivery confirmation and SMS alerts for your security