If you have to send a fax, you are probably looking for an easy way to get that done. Using a traditional fax machine is far from easy, but now you can email to fax with Gmail simply and intuitively. With a third-party fax service like RingCentral, you can use your Gmail account as a fax machine and truly get everything done in one place.

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Email to Fax With Gmail

Back in the day, the only way to send a fax was to have your own machine or to visit someplace with a machine that would send your fax for you (for several dollars a page). Fax machines are clunky and can be difficult to use right if you’re not used to using them regularly, and maintaining a landline solely to send the occasional fax is not exactly cost-effective for the average person (or even the average business).

Yet there are some situations where we must still send faxes. If you are working with a lawyer or sending documents to a doctor’s office or hospital, for example, you may have discovered that these entities require faxes. Sometimes the government also requires faxes, and many foreign companies still prefer to receive important documents, like contracts, by fax.

Can I Really Use Email?

So, if all these agencies and entities require faxes, how can you use email? That’s what your third-party fax service is for. Gmail does not have a faxing service because faxes must go out across landlines, and email uses the Internet. A third-party service, however, can take your documents and fax them to your recipients in less than five minutes.

You simply send the documents to your fax service by email from wherever you are and whatever device you use for email. It’s simple and intuitive, and it doesn’t require you to stand in line at the office supply store or library, or even at your own fax machine, hoping it’s going through and that you have the pages turned in the right direction!

How To Send an Email Fax

The first step is just to sign up with your third-party fax service and link it to your email. You can actually use the third-party fax service app or website, if you prefer, but linking it to your email allows you to send faxes as easily and quickly as you would send an email. Once your account is linked, you just sign into your email from any device and choose Compose to start a new email.

In the To field, you’ll put the phone number of your fax recipient and the suffix of your third-party fax service. Your phone number should have no spaces or special characters in it, so instead of (123) 456-7891, your address will look like this: 1234567891@rcfax.com. Once you have the address in, you attach your documents as you normally would to an email. You can send to multiple recipients by simply separating each one with a comma, just as you would with email addresses.

If you want to include a cover letter, type that into the subject line of your email. Don’t put anything in the body of the email, as nothing in this area will be sent. Now you’re done! Just hit send, and your email fax is on its way to RingCentral, who will send it by international faxing protocols to your recipient within minutes.

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