Reason number one to do away with your fax machine is RingCentral Fax. The online fax service lets you send and receive faxes through the internet via the company's website or with any email account. It eliminates the need to purchase fax toner cartridges or additional reams of paper to feed that noisy fax machine. It can save you time, money and even office space.
This service offers one of the best-priced web-based fax options of any online fax service we reviewed. It has the largest number of free faxes, no set-up fee and options that make faxing easy and efficient. You can depend on a low fax bill with few surprises. That's why we gave RingCentral Fax our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award.
The company's Fax 700 plan allows you 700 send or receive fax pages per month. It's the best deal among online fax services on our list. It includes the option of toll-free or local fax numbers, unlimited fax storage, electronic signatures and mobile alerts when a fax is received.
We liked this service because it allows you to access the faxing interface in several ways. You can look at your account via the online interface, a handy desktop tool or from Outlook or another integrated email client. This service can import fax numbers from your Outlook and Outlook Express contact lists and allows you to send all kinds of attachments, from Word documents to image files.
RingCentral Fax does everything. We liked its interface and desktop tool, and we were thrilled to see how we could set it up to work with our Outlook account. You can store the last 200 messages in your account for an unlimited period of time and save your messages on your desktop for as long as you want. Just be sure to back up your messages from time to time. This fax service can receive faxes from any fax machine or fax service, and vanity fax numbers are available for a small fee.
In terms of security, you can send your faxes over a secure connection and store them in a password-protected account. The service offers great spam fax protection and filters. You can block or allow specific numbers or area codes, and you can customize your own filters, such as setting a filter to block fax messages without caller ID. Blocking features are important, especially if you publish your fax number online, since spam faxes can use up your page allowance quickly if you're not careful. It is nice to see that RingCentral Fax supports solid anti-spam fax efforts.
You can send and receive faxes through the desktop interface or through the online service. We liked the desktop tool, which lets you know when a new fax comes in. You can also set it to send you an email or cell phone alert. As far as attachments go, this service supports more than 50 different file formats, including all Microsoft Office documents, CSV files and image formats including PSDs, xml and html files.
We enjoyed how this service integrates with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook. These two applications are at the top of their game in office software and email clients, respectively. This service also enables you to fax from any application you can access within Microsoft Windows. You just have to click the RingCentral Fax icon on your application toolbar or select it from the file menu of the application you're using.
You can schedule fax delivery times, whether you want your faxes to go out in the middle of the night or by lunchtime each day. There's international faxing with RingCentral Fax, and you can sign faxes with an electronic signature.
Through the handy desktop tool, you can view your incoming faxes, access your account, synchronize contacts, send faxes and more if you subscribe to RingCentral Fax's call services. When we tested this service, we noticed that our faxes went through quickly and that it is easy to create cover pages. This whole service is easy to use and can save you from the tedious work of printing documents, entering fax numbers and feeding pages into a fax machine. And it allows you to reduce paper waste.
It's nice to have a neat record of sent and received faxes in your online account. You can view the date, time, length and result of each fax sent or received. This feature eliminates the need to print reports to see if something has arrived or to run to the fax machine to get a confirmation report. This service can save you many hours of work as well as lower your stress level and paper use.
RingCentral Fax offers four different plans: Fax 500, Fax 700, Fax 1000 and Fax 2500. The Fax 500 plan comes with 500 pages, while you get 700, 1000 and 2500 pages with the Fax 700, Fax 1000 and Fax 2500 plans, respectively. Once you go over this page limit, you have to pay a 6-cent fee for each page sent or received. There is no set-up fee or charge to store faxes. You don't have to worry about the most expensive plan having more features than the cheapest plan because RingCentral Fax includes all its features in every plan.
RingCentral Fax is simple to use. Within minutes, we had the desktop interface installed, the service synchronized with our Outlook and our first fax with a cover page sent out. We did not have to consult with the help pages to use this service. We looked through them for the review, but you should be able to sign up, install the optional desktop interface and have your first fax sent out within minutes. We also found it easy to set our preferences, such as our notifications and allow or block preferences. The online interface is clean, straightforward and uncomplicated.
This service provides its customers with a FAQs section unlike any we saw with the other online fax services we reviewed. While other fax services display a handful of questions and 
answers, RingCentral Fax's database has hundreds of informative entries. RingCentral Fax also allows users to interact on its message board. These forums present some quality information.
If you can't find the answers you need in any of these resources, you can contact the company via its 24-hour telephone support line. There's also email support and a user guide. RingCentral Fax offers a free 30-day trial. The company does not offer live chat, but with the phone support, who needs it?
RingCentral Fax eliminates the limitations imposed by other online fax services, creating a flexible experience for anyone to enjoy. We first looked at online fax services a few years ago and could see the value of this type of service right away. We were pleased to see a service like RingCentral Fax embracing the possibilities of online communications.
RingCentral Fax offers some of the best-priced packages and provides the highest number of free faxes of any of the online fax services we studied. The service is convenient to use, with a host of effective features and options. It has online and desktop account access, as well as email and cell phone notifications. We cannot think of anything this service lacks when compared to its competition.
