[Asterisk-biz] alternative to efax needed

[Paul]

The only good thing I can possibly say about efax support is that it is 
so kind of them to hire so many mentally challenged folks.

I have had a $12.95/month number with them for a few years. I get less 
than 25 faxes per month and about half of them are junk faxes. I used 
the send feature a few times but a few months ago it stopped working 
with firefox/linux so I just went ahead and plugged my hp all-in-one 
into a phone line for sending.

Anyway, I recently logged into the account and changed the credit card 
on file. Because the outgoing prepay balance was below $2 they attempted 
to charge the card $10. I kindly asked them if they could just credit my 
usage balance 60 cents to make it $2.10 since I have no intention of 
ever using them for sending again. The result of this is a few emails 
explaining what I already know about the $2 threshhold triggering a $10 
charge. My messages to them have simply stated that if they won't credit 
me 60 cents I will cancel the service entirely.

Anybody here offering good alternatives to efax/j2? Note that local DID 
is no longer much of a feature since nobody in US48 should be paying 
nore than 4c these days. Security is important. The simplest 
implementation I can think of is to only send notification email and let 
the subscriber pick up the file via https. I actually think that 
approach is best for SOHO voip-ers. I have seen call quality degrade 
while emails with large attachments are arriving.

There are several other things I can suggest if anybody here is serious 
about getting into this market. I setup hylafax without problems over 4 
years ago. I had no problem getting it so email the faxes as a pdf 
attachment. The only reason I did not use it for production is that even 
with my centrex contract it did not make sense to dedicate a line for a 
dozen faxes per month. I believe the market for this type of service 
improves as fax usage declines.