Fax Online: The Complete Playbook for Digital Teams

Intro

Your team probably runs on Notion, communicates through Discord, and hasn't touched a printer in months. But faxing is still happening for 17% of businesses globally, according to a 2024 report. (1)

The healthcare industry, for instance, still sends a volume of documents, with reports recording up to 9 billion faxes sent in 2020 alone. Legal teams also fax contracts. Real estate agents fax purchase agreements, while financial advisors fax client paperwork. That’s because regulations make faxing the path of least resistance. (2)

That said, nobody is standing at a machine anymore. Online fax services handle everything digitally now, which means your team can work with faxing without completely losing their minds. Here’s a complete playbook on how this works.

How Online Faxing Works

Traditional fax machines turned documents into audio signals and pushed them through phone lines. That wasn’t a favorable process, as it required dedicated hardware, paper jams, and busy signals.

Online faxing keeps the same transmission protocol but ditches everything else. When you send a fax online with eFax, you're uploading a digital file to a service that converts it to the right format. Then it routes the document through fax servers and delivers it to the recipient's fax number. If someone sends you a fax, it shows up as a PDF in your email or through a web portal.

There’s no need for phone lines, machines, and paper (unless you want to print it).

But security is as attractive as convenience here. Secure online fax services use Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit data encryption for transmission. As per tech experts, this algorithm is the strongest among others. Your files stay encrypted while they're moving and stored, which satisfies the compliance part of the business. (3)

Picking A Service

To pick the right one for your team, assess if their system integrates with what you're already using. If your team lives in Google Drive and Microsoft Office, your fax service needs to work directly with those tools. Otherwise, people will have to download files, upload them somewhere else, and you've added steps instead of removing them.

You must also look into volume capacity. Most services have monthly page limits. Go over, and you're paying overage fees that add up fast. So, calculate the volume you need, then add 30% of contingency.

Then, ask if they have mobile apps. With over 60% web traffic coming from mobile devices, your team also needs to send and receive faxes from their phones as easily as from a desktop. If the mobile experience is clunky, people will put off faxing until they're at their desk, which defeats the whole point. (4)

Phone number type also matters. Local numbers look more approachable, while toll-free fax numbers can increase response rates when you're requesting documents from clients. That’s because people still associate toll-free numbers with legitimate businesses. If you work internationally, you need a service with actual international coverage.

Features That Change How You Work

Modern digital faxing tools transform document management into a streamlined, data-driven process. Below are features that integrate directly into your existing digital environment to increase speed and accuracy.

• Digital signatures: Skip the print-sign-scan cycle entirely. Team members can apply digital signatures directly to documents, keeping the entire workflow within the digital environment.
• Fax-to-email capabilities: Better services can parse incoming faxes, extract key information, and route documents based on content.
• AI-Driven Insights: Modern enterprise tools analyze fax patterns to predict volume spikes. They flag missing confirmations or unusual activity, helping you identify and resolve technical issues early.
• Straight-Through Processing (STP): This integration eliminates manual data entry by pulling information from incoming faxes and populating your database automatically. It is particularly effective for insurance claims and patient intake workflows.
• Cloud Storage: Online storage turns your faxes into searchable digital assets. With proper tagging, you can find a specific fax in seconds instead of digging through folders or scrolling through months of email. Seems small until you need to find something urgently.

With these capabilities, organizations can move away from legacy hardware constraints and treat faxed data as a high-speed digital asset.

Don’t Skip Security

You must not cut corners when it comes to security obligations.

Encryption needs to cover transmission and storage separately. Your service should encrypt during transmission (TLS or SSL protocols). But storage encryption matters just as much because faxes sitting on servers also need protection.

Access controls may also get complicated with multiple team members handling sensitive documents. So, apply role-based permissions that let you restrict who views certain faxes, who sends from specific numbers, and who accesses historical records.

Audit trails prove compliance when regulators ask questions. Your system should log everything. This includes who sent what, transmission time, delivery confirmation, who viewed and received documents, and the number of failed attempts. These logs also help when you're troubleshooting workflow problems.

Physical security would also be assessed. When people access sensitive faxes on a mobile device in coffee shops, screen privacy becomes an issue. You need policies about where sensitive faxes can be viewed. You may also require screen locks with reasonable timeouts for company devices.

Mistakes Everyone Makes

Every team hits the same problems when moving to online faxing. Learn from their pain.

Poor document quality from scanning, for instance, ruins everything. People scan at low resolution, creating technically successful transmissions, but they are completely illegible on the receiving end.

To ensure the proper resolution, set the minimum standard to 200 x 100 DPI (dots per inch) for text documents. You must go higher to 200 x 200 DPI for line art or images. In fact, this is the optimal resolution.

File format confusion also creates delays. Modern services accept various file types, but PDF is the most reliable. That’s because Word documents can have formatting issues, like images sometimes exceeding size limits. Just standardize on PDF for anything important and save yourself the headache.

International faxing presents another hurdle, as incorrect country code formatting often leads to failed transmissions. To solve this, create templates with proper international dialing formats for your common destinations so staff don't have to figure it out every time.

Notification fatigue should be considered as well. When team members get email alerts for every incoming fax, they start ignoring all of them. Configure notifications thoughtfully. High-priority senders get immediate alerts, while routine faxes can be batched in digest emails.

Rolling This Out Without Chaos

Start with one department. Pick a team that faxes regularly but isn't drowning in volume. Let them work out the kinks, and you'll discover problems you didn't anticipate. For instance, you might find that certain file types do not convert well, workflows break, or there is general confusion about where received faxes are stored.

Document everything during the pilot. Assess which file formats work best, who struggles with the interface, and where people get stuck. You need this information before you roll out to everyone.

Set up naming conventions early, too. When ten people are sending faxes daily, you need consistent file names, or searching becomes impossible. Something like "YYYYMMDD_RecipientName_DocumentType" works. The rule is to make it simple, sortable, and searchable.

Train only on the basics. Most people don't need to know every feature. They just need to know how to send a document securely, how to confirm it was delivered, and how to find a fax they received last week. Those high-frequency tasks need familiarity.

If possible, take advantage of automation. Online fax services usually support automatic retries if transmission fails, scheduled sending for different time zones, and routing rules for incoming faxes.

Once you're confident the online system works, disconnect your old fax line. While someone may complain, getting ahead of the curve is better for your team.

Action Plan

While theory is nice, execution is what matters. And here’s how you can go about the whole process.

• Weeks 1-2: Research and selection. Look at three to five services based on your requirements. Request demos. Talk to current customers in your industry. Verify compliance certifications carefully.
• Weeks 3-4: Pilot setup. Configure for your pilot group. Set up integrations with key systems. Create initial training materials. Establish basic workflows and naming conventions.
• Weeks 5-8: Run the pilot while keeping your old system as backup. Gather feedback aggressively. Fix problems. Adjust processes. Document what works and what doesn't.
• Weeks 9-10: Expand to additional departments based on what you learned. Provide hands-on training. Make support resources accessible.
• Weeks 11-12: Move remaining users to the new platform. Disconnect old fax lines. Archive historical documents according to retention policies.

Lastly, optimize and explore advanced features. With basics working, look at automated routing, AI categorization, and deeper integrations.

What's Coming Next

Faxing isn't disappearing. It's just changing shape.

Integration will get tighter. So, expect connections between fax services and collaboration platforms, project management tools, and application development frameworks. Sending faxes will feel as native as sending emails within your existing workflows.

AI will handle more of the grunt work, too. This will see document classification, data extraction, and intelligent routing improve fast. The manual sorting that still eats up staff time will increasingly happen automatically.

Regulations will eventually shift. As digital communication methods prove their security, some industries might finally reduce fax dependency. But that's a years-long transition, not months. Teams that master online faxing now will adapt smoothly when requirements change.

Hybrid communication strategies will also become normal. Instead of choosing email, fax, or something else, systems will automatically pick the right channel based on recipient preferences, content sensitivity, and regulations.

Making It Work

Your implementation won't be perfect immediately. You'll find edge cases, encounter resistant team members, and hit unexpected technical problems. That's normal. But what matters is building something measurably better than what you had before.

Because the best technology is ultimately the technology that just works when you need it. Even if that technology is faxing in 2026.