The business world is sloooowly transitioning from fax to email. However, we still have to use both technologies if that’s what our customers want us to do.
I found a low-cost fax machine that can scan to email as well as transmit normal faxes. The machine is the Sharp FO-IS125N. The best price I found was at Amazon. Here’s a link to the product page (no commissions are earned via this link).
Not only does this machine scan to email, you can set it to email a copy of all incoming faxes to you. This is great for archiving, but also for getting your faxes when you are out of the office.
If you buy this machine, make sure you set up a separate email account for it. You can use free email services such as gmail if you like. This machine has a bug in the firmware causing it to download and destroy all incoming email messages. You can set the reply-to email address to your regular business email account so when people reply to your scanned email messages they’ll come to the email address of your choice.
I bought this machine out of frustration.
All business owners want to be as efficient as possible. We hate wasting time on unnecessary tasks.
These days, many of my customers and suppliers send me a form via an email attachment, expect me to print it, fill it in or sign it, and then send it back to them via email, not fax.
This was getting to be a pain. I could scan it into my computer, compose an email message, add the attachment and send it. Too slow.
With the Sharp machine, you put in your document, press “Scan to Email”, type in the email address on the keypad, and press “Start”. In about 3 seconds the email is sent. It’s just like sending a fax, except you type in an email address instead of a phone number.
I chose to use the pdf format, but you can also choose the tiff format.
There is an easy-to-use control panel that you access from the web browser on any computer on your local network.
I have had to send up to 15 email messages a day from paper originals. This fantastic machine has improved my productivity and lowered my costs. That’s the bottom line.
