From: Benjamin Koh (benkoh_at_leland.Stanford.EDU)
Date: Thu May 20 1999 - 22:22:57 EDT
Well, I have JFAX, which is the same thing - my faxes are free and come
to me as .TIF attachments. The simple answer to your question can be
found in the User Agreement (you did read that didn't you?). In it, you
agree to receive "unsolicited commercial email." So the company makes
its money by selling your personal details to marketing companies, who
then merrily send you information about their "valuable" services and
products. I've had my fair share of crap arrive ever since I signed up
for JFAX. Fortunately my filters work, so I receive spam only once from
each source - then I block it. I figure the minor (for now) spam
annoyance is worth the $100+ I'd need for a fax machine proper.
Benjamin
Andrew Webber wrote:
>
> [I'm posting this here because you're all such bright people].
>
> I'm going nuts. I just signed up for eFax. (It's a service that
> receives faxes and emails them to you in a compressed format).
>
> They gave me a personal eFax number which looks like a real phone
> number. I sent myself a fax from my fax machine. No coversheet,
> no identification, actually just a 1/4 page of hand-written notes I
> made this morning.
>
> Within 30 seconds, there was an email for me. It was the fax!
>
> 1. How do can they hand out phone numbers like this? I was
> expecting them to require and extra code or something!
> 2. What's their business model? Are they going to make it up on
> sales of the enhanced (800#) service?
>
> For being on the road, this would be absolutely incredible! I've
> been wondering about looking into fax service from my cell-phone
> company (I've seen ads from others -- the fax is "received" on your
> cell phone but actually stored like vmail at the company, then you
> find a local fax machine and redirect the fax). This is partly
> better & partly worse. But it's free!
>
> I don't want this to sound like a commercial. Forget the business
> case (maybe it's the usual "there's no business case" of the
> Internet), how the heck are they doing this? And are there any
> worries other than security of the fax (which is a bigger problem
> at a hotel fax machine)?
>
> Thanks!
>
> andrew
> ------
> my local weather today: http://cnn.com/WEATHER/html/OttawaOntario.html
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