In these days of email, voicemail and text messages, it's amazing that the humble fax is still an integral and important part of the way many businesses operate. Indeed, the very nature of some businesses necessitates receiving a great many faxes that must be delivered to the correct recipient and promptly actioned before being accurately filed.

Many businesses that are obliged to use faxes are doing so because they are receiving legal documents, which by their very nature usually run to dozens of pages. Often only a few pages of a long document actually need printing. Regardless, the fax machine prints out all these documents in full.

If your business is one of those that rely heavily on fax, you will probably be all too aware of other shortcomings too:

They are expensive to receive, someone has to deliver them from a central machine to individual recipients, it's all too easy to overlook an important one that gets trapped unnoticed between others or to deliver them to the wrong person, they must be filed and take up expensive storage space.

With their insatiable appetite for ink and paper as well as maintenance costs, fax machines can be very expensive to run. And nothing irritates more than the unsolicited junk fax that still incurs the cost of ink and paper even though it's destined to be immediately filed in the bin.

But what if it wasn't necessary to print out every fax in full saving ink and paper? What if they could be stored on computer rather than in physical filing cabinets saving valuable storage space? What if there was another more efficient way to receive and handle faxes? Well the good news is that there is and it may not even cost you anything.

Now that most people have an Internet connected PC on their desk it makes sense to have faxes delivered electronically to their desktop. This can be easily achieved by using a fax to email service that employs a virtual phone number to receive faxes that are then sent to your preferred email address as an email attachment. And as many email to fax services are available either free or for a small monthly subscription, they'll soon start saving you money too.

A fax to email service is far more flexible too as you can receive your faxes wherever you have Internet access to your email. Each fax can be printed or not as the situation demands and can be filed on your PC. You can even leave them on the email server. Not having to store hard copy faxes saves expensive office space that can be better utilized for another purpose.

And there are other advantages. For instance, most fax to email services will ensure your virtual fax number is never engaged and are set to enable receipt of multiple faxes simultaneously. As there is no need for fax recipients to visit a central fax machine, faxes won't be accidentally discarded or inadvertently picked up by the wrong person. In fact, keeping faxes confidential is easy when you give every employee their own fax number. Remember, the recipient email address can be set to send emails to more than one address. So a fax can be sent to an individual as well as a central company fax folder.

If your business is obliged to receive faxes a fax to email solution is well worth investigating especially when so many services are available free of charge.