Outgoing FAX

[usa2k]

How about residential being allowed outgoing FAX(from files) as a standard feature?

Perhaps allow 3 free calls per month, with a small fee for more?

Your a-la-cart incoming FAX number is still great for the opposite direction. Combined with residential, that could bump the free outgoing quota.

Outgoing FAX would just offer a security blanket that may hook some people on the whole FAX service, and others may never use. And it would define VOIPo as being different in another good way.

[fisamo]

OK, this point isn't exactly related to the OP, but it is about the outgoing FAX service.

I just sent a FAX (not a critical need, and easy enough to re-send if necessary), and everything seemed to go well. I entered the number, browsed for the file to upload (a PDF), hit 'send' and got the 'Your fax has been submitted for processing' message (not sure of the exact wording). One minor thing I noticed is that if I navigated away from the Send FAX screen and then went back to it, the 'Your FAX has been submitted for processing' message would still appear, and on the 'order FAX' page, the FAX count never incremented (not sure if it's set to do so for outgoing FAXes yet).

The more significant issue is that there's never any indication of the status of the transmission, aside from the 'submitted for processing' message. I noticed that there is no automated feedback for a successful FAX transmission. How about failed transmissions? Is an email generated to the account holder to notify them to resend? With your equipment, is there a way to identify BUSY vs 'not a FAX number' vs failed for some other reason? How many times is a transmission attempted before your system gives up? (I see it's at least two--I tried sending a FAX to one of my voice lines, and it's been called twice now... )

[vipsoft]

fisamo's message reminded me of something...

There are times when I need a confirmation that a fax was sent. What I'd like to receive in my email inbox is a .pdf of the fax (all pages) that I sent, plus a trailing page that shows the time/date stamp, destination phone number, length of transmission (number of pages and time to send), and transmission status.

(In the future, the trailing page could also be "branded".)

[gatorrobin]

Older thread, but I agree on the notification.

I have sent several faxes through the send fax gateway in my vpanel and have had 100% success every time. The times I have needed to send faxes, I had to speak to the person soon afterward anyway so I always found out within the next hour or so that it went through.

Once, I was on the phone with a company that needed a copy of my ID for something, which I had anticipated so I had already had it scanned into a PDF. When I receive the fax number from the CSR over the phone it just took a few seconds to type in the number and upload the PDF. I said "ok the fax is on the way" and the CSR said, "wow, yeah here it comes" LOL