Do you need to send a fax right now? Follow the steps outlined here, and you can send a fax through email in just a couple minutes.

Test Drive Our #1 Recommended Choice and Fax Free for 30 Days!

How to Send a Fax Through Email Right Away

1. Sign Up With a Fax Service

First, you’ll need to sign up for a fax service that can send your emailed documents as faxing according to international faxing protocols. Your email provider doesn’t actually have a fax service because everything they send goes over the Internet. There are various fax services to choose from, but we recommend using an established service with a good track record of security and professionalism, like RingCentral.

There are “fax” apps available on the various app stores for the mobile devices you own, but these aren’t true fax services for the most part. They call themselves that, but they aren’t sending any faxes over landlines, and the other party must have the same app in order to receive your fax. Security is very questionable, too, so these applications aren’t safe for sending sensitive documents.

A true fax service will send an actual fax, which your recipient can receive at an actual fax machine if that’s what they’re using. Furthermore, you need a service that takes security seriously and won’t spam your fax with ads printed on top of it.

2. Link Your Email and Compose

Once you have signed up for your fax service, was just takes a moment or two, you then have the option to link your email. You can send a fax right there through your fax service website portal, but most people prefer to link through email because it’s just so easy and intuitive to use.

Once you do this, sending a fax becomes just as simple as sending an email. When you’re ready to send your fax, just choose Compose as if you were writing a new email.

3. Address Your Fax

When you go to address your fax, all you need is the phone number of your recipient’s fax machine. This phone number may be expressed traditionally, meaning, there are special characters and spaces in it. You won’t use any of these when you address your fax to send it as an email.

Instead, you’ll use the numbers only, followed by the suffix @rcfax.com (which sends it to RingCentral), and you’ll put this into the To field of your email. Your address will look something like this: 9998887676@rcfax.com

4. Attach Documents and Put on a Cover Letter

You don’t have to print out the documents you want to send as you do if you’re using a traditional fax machine. All you have to do is attach those documents just as you would attach them to any email. That means the documents can come from your own computer or from any place where you store documents, such as Google Drive.

You can attach any documents you like, but the best and most secure are usually PDF. To put a cover letter on your fax, simply type this into the Subject field of the email. Remember that you should have nothing whatsoever in the body of your email. Nothing in the body will get sent.

Are you ready to try email faxing and see how fast and easy it can be? It’s the simplest way to send a fax these days, and your recipient will receive the fax just as if you’d sent it from a traditional fax machine. Test Drive Our #1 Recommended Choice and Fax Free for 30 Days!