One thing that I’ve looked for in the past is a way to send and receive faxes online without having to fork out some sort of fee. Personally I would have thought by now that faxes would have become extinct, but apparently they are still a critical part of how people conduct business each and every day.
But thanks to a free online fax service called Drop.io we might be able to start bridging the digital gap. It’s an interesting service that is designed to let you share media in a variety of ways. You can upload just about anything to share with people via email, over the web, or of course by faxing it.
It will let you both send and receive faxes, but if you intend on receiving a fax you’ll need to provide the other party with a specialized Drop.io cover letter to use. That way Drop.io will know who exactly the received fax is for. And there’s apparently no ads or anything printed on the faxes!
Drop.io unfortunately only works with United States phone numbers, but I don’t believe it is restricted to United States residents. That means you could live overseas and still be able to send faxes to someone in the U.S. completely free. That’s pretty sweet.
Oh, and I’m sure you’re wondering what the image has to do with the article. Well, that plaque is something I walked by nearly everyday when attending Iowa State University. Naturally when I began writing something about a fax service that was the first thing that popped into my head. 
Alright, here are the instructions for using Drop.io as a free online fax service:
To send a fax from your drop to a recipient:
- Click on ‘send as fax’ next to any document (.DOC) or PDF
- Enter the 10 digit fax number of the recipient (our service is US only)
- Your fax is sent, end of story
Note: you can only fax out documents up to 20 pages.. Certain word documents with embedded charts, or other OLE objects PDF files made with Postscript 3 will not work.
To receive a fax into your drop:
- Go to your drop and click ‘receive a fax’
- Email the cover sheet to the person sending the fax to your drop OR click ‘this coversheet’ and send the custom drop.io cover sheet to the person sending the fax
- The sender must put the drop.io cover-page on top of the fax.
- The fax will appear in your drop as a .PDF
Note: So, the basic idea, to fax a document into a drop you must use the drop’s custom ‘cover page’ – give the cover page to the fax sender and you are in good shape (email it to them, print it and send it to them, whatever you want)
Interesting never seen the ‘.io’ TLD before. It appears to belong to the British Indian Ocean Territory ([en.wikipedia.org]), but anyone can register an .io name. Looks like they’ve had the name since April 4, 2007 and pushed out their registration to 2013 back in October, a good sign they plan on being around a while.
Thanks, will try it out next time I need a fax sent. last time caused so much grief…damn Vista basic not including a fax tool. another reason MS gave the everyday person to hate vista.
I’m with you Ryan – I too thought fax would be extinct by now! And am amazing by the number of situations that I encounter that the only option given to me is to fax a document that could have so easily (and more securely) be completed digitally.
Thanks!! Will defintely give this new option a try the next time this happens and let you know my thoughts…
_j
community manager
CorePage | The Instant Link System
It was new to me as well, and they are using it to symbolize input/output which is kinda clever.
You’d still need a phone line to send the fax in Vista even if you did have the feature though, which is where my problem lies.
We’ll get there some day just as email has taken over the preferred way to send letters to people. I just never guessed the digital adoption would be so darn slow.