Faxes? Are you kidding me? Does anybody use them anymore? Turns out, a lot of people do. A recent article in Inc Technology reports that approximately 25 million U.S. businesses — large and small — still use traditional fax machines. And only about 30 - 40% of small businesses have adopted some form of Internet-based faxing. And another study by AT&T shows that 57% of small businesses polled said that fax machines are very important to running their businesses. So clearly, there is a lot of faxing happening.

If you are a small business using either electronic or traditional fax, you should consider centralizing them all in a single place, so that the information in fax is available readily to you. Imagine fumbling through a wad of paper when your customer is on the line waiting for you to sift through them. Even if you use electronic fax, many providers still send the faxes as TIFF files (yep, TIFF files are nearly synonymous with faxes even today), which cannot be viewed in a browser and need special software in your desktop.

If your business already uses OfficeDrop, you can easily centralize all your electronic faxes with a few simple steps. Almost all desktop email clients (such as Micrsoft Outlook or Apple Mail) and web based email (such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc,.) provide the ability to setup rules to automatically forward emails to another account. You can configure this rule to forward to your pixilymail email dropbox.

1. Automatically forward all email from your electronic fax provider to your pixilymail account. For example, automatically configure all email from Links to popular email clients are provided below. When configuring use your pixilymail email account as the forwarding address.

• Microsoft Outlook 2003
• Microsoft Outlook 2007
• Gmail

2. Update your OfficeDrop preference to not notify sender about received emails. By default, when someone sends an email to your pixilymail account, the sender gets a confirmation that the documents have been received by OfficeDrop. Sometimes, depending on email server configuration, OfficeDrop will think of the email as coming from your electronic fax provider and not from you. So it is recommended that you turn off the notification. This means that you also have to add your fax provider to the allowed domains list. (Hat tip to our incredible user base for this suggestion. You rock!)

   Turn off Email notification to sender:
   

   Authorize your fax domain provider (if necessary):
   

This same tip applies to electronic receipts as well. For example, you may configure the amazon.com domain as above and have all your receipts automatically be aggregated in OfficeDrop.

Do you still use a fax machine to communicate? Do you find this useful? Any other suggestions on making your fax life easier? Let us know.