Have you ever been in these situations? If you had a fax machine at home, you could get those items faxed to you at home. Well, you don't need to buy a fax machine and hassle with setting it up because you can subscribe to an Internet fax service that allows you to receive faxes as email attachments--for less than $15/year.

Two great deals currently available in the faxing world:

www.maxemail.com lets you set up an account for incoming faxes for $15/year (plus $10 setup fee). The $15/year account allows you to receive up to 500 pages per month at a non-local number (sender pays long-distance charges).
Editor's note: As of August, 2006, I noticed the annual rate has increased to $24/year

www.efax.com lets you receive up to 20 pages/month at a non-local number--at no charge! (Send over 20 pages in a month and your account gets suspended).

Both services have higher cost accounts that provide more services.

I have been using EFax for several years (EFax Plus for $12.95/month, unlimited incoming faxes, using a local number). The thing I like about Internet faxing is you can:

• Save your faxes, since they come in an email
• Easily forward the faxes to someone
• Receive the faxes at multiple email address (home and work for example)
• Skip the "junk" faxes
• Avoid paying for a dedicated line for incoming faxes

We still use a fax machine for outgoing faxes--but we have fewer and fewer faxes going out.