Sending a fax by a regular fax machine can be pretty time-consuming. The good news is, once you know how to send a fax from Gmail, sending a fax becomes as quick and easy as sending an email. We’ll explain exactly how it works.

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How to Send a Fax from Gmail: Get It There Fast

The first thing to know is that Gmail does not have its own fax service. You cannot actually send a fax using Gmail without having signed up for a third-party fax service like RingCentral. That’s because faxes must be sent over phone lines according to international faxing protocols, and Gmail, naturally, is sent over the Internet. So how does it work?

Sign Up With a Service

You sign up with your third-party service, and then you send your fax to them using Gmail. They will give you a fax number that belongs to you, and you’ll just address each fax with your recipient’s fax number and the RingCentral suffix. That means your faxes will have something like this in the To field:

8883435656@rcfax.com

Your fax will go to RingCentral, and they will deliver it as a PDF directly to your recipient’s fax machine. There won’t be anything odd about it: it won’t look any different than if you had sent it using a traditional fax machine. Also, unlike some of those suspicious “faxing apps” that advertise themselves on the Google Play and Apple App stores, your recipient doesn’t need to have the same app loaded on their device to receive your “fax.”

Using Gmail

Once you have signed up with your third-party service, it just takes a moment to link your email. While you can use the third-party’s website portal to send your faxes, or you can download their app to do it, the fastest and simplest way is to use your own Gmail. You just compose an email as normal, address it as illustrated above, put your cover letter into the subject field, and attach whatever documents you want to fax.

You can send almost any type of document, even images, but RingCentral will put them into a PDF to send them on to your recipient’s fax machine. If you have images, the fastest way to send them is to simply incorporate them into your own PDF or word document where you want them to be.

How Quick Is This?

With a traditional fax machine, you have to dial the recipient’s number, wait for the signal indicating that the line is not busy and the machine is ready to receive, and then fax your pages slowly, one at a time. The whole time, you are hoping that you have the pages facing in the right direction (if you don’t send faxes regularly, it’s just so hard to remember). You’re also trying to feed them in at just the right rate so that there’s no jam, but they also go through as one document and you don’t have to send the second half as a second fax.

Once you send the fax, you stand around, waiting for confirmation that it went through. When you use Gmail, you eliminate all of that trouble for yourself. You’ll get a notification from your third-party service as soon as your fax has arrived, and you can just go about your business as usual as soon as you hit the send button. It usually takes no more than five minutes for RingCentral to send your fax for you.

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