Virtual Fax on Your Business Phone System

Fax still matters

Medical offices, law firms, insurance agencies, lenders and government offices still send and receive faxes every day. Virtual fax keeps your fax number working without a fax line: incoming faxes are converted to PDF and delivered to email or the portal, and you send faxes from email or the portal.

Three ways to fax

1. Instant Fax portal – view incoming faxes and send outgoing faxes from the PBX portal or by email. No fax machine needed.
2. Instant Fax ATA – keep using an existing fax machine through an adapter connected to the Instant Fax service. This is the option we recommend if you want to keep a machine.
3. Fax over a SIP ATA – supported on a best-effort basis only, because traditional fax signals are sensitive to the small delays and jitter of internet connections.

Sending a fax by email

Write an email to the recipient's 11-digit fax number at the fax domain we give you, attach the documents and send. You can attach several files – documents and images – and the system merges them into one fax in alphabetical order of the file names. The email address you send from must belong to a user on your phone system; we set that up, and we also set the caller ID so recipients can fax you back.

Receiving and tracking faxes

Incoming faxes can be delivered to email, just like voicemail, and are always available in the portal. Outgoing faxes go into a delivery queue: the fax server tries up to six times, and the result – sent or failed, usually because the line was busy or a person answered – appears in the Sent folder of the portal. Your fax number is printed in the header of every fax you send.

Size limits

• Instant Fax portal: 20 MB or 100 pages per fax, whichever comes first.
• Fax to email: 10 MB or 100 pages.
• Instant Fax ATA: no fixed size, but keep faxes to 100 pages or fewer – long faxes over the internet are more likely to fail.

Virtual fax is part of the Professional plan.