MetroFax

MetroFax is a 10 year old privately held company that offers Internet Fax. The sign up is fairly straight forward.  They accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express. MetroFax is a great buy at $12.95 a month and sports a simple and  excellent online interface. Screen shots at end of article. See November 2010 news update for MetroFax

New – MetroFax Email Fax Service. New plans from $7.95/mo including 500 pages. With a 30 day Free Trail

News May 2011 for MetroFax

Lot’s of great news from MetroFax this month. Here is a quick rundown.

• Free 30 day trial is now avaialbe
• New back end dashboard and fax management see below for more on this
• Two new pricing packages starting at a low under $80 a year for an excellent 500 pages a month

March  2011 News for MetroFax

Updated May 2011

News – Metrofax is now registered with the BBB. What does that mean to you? First it does not mean they are better than the other services. It does mean they commit to a high level of customer service. As a Better Business Bureau member MetroFax must commit to answering all complaints within a reasonable time period, set by the BBB. If you complain to the BBB they notify MetroFax and they have to respond or risk loosing their standing. Bravo to MetroFax and Good news for users.

MetroFax 2011 news

MetroFax now has an iPhone App making it even easier for you to receive faxes no matter were you are.

More November 2010 news from MetroFax
MetroFax now includes up to 10 additional email id’s per account. Additional email addresses are useful if you use your MetroFax account from multiple email accounts. For example, you can send a fax from either your business or personal email account or you can have up to 10 people in the office enjoy the benefits of MetroFax with no addition monthly fee.

You can also configure each additional email address to be used for sending only or to also receive any incoming faxes.

MetroFax has changed so many things I’m just going to list them out here and give you extend coverage later. Of these the most notable are the Expanded Network which directly positively impacts performance, the elimination of signup fees and the ability to change the header.

• The setup fee has been eliminated
• Porting fee for moving a current fax number is now only $24.95
• MetroFax Dashboard has been redesigned

• Text message (SMS) notifications to mobile phones make sure MetroFax users are never “out of the office” and miss an important fax.
• Email notifications can be sent in either HTML or plain text delivery formats.
• Fax send retry attempts and time interval between attempts can be customized.
• Additional fax transmission details can be included in notifications.
• Fax headers can be customized with custom text and numbers. Now company names and phone numbers can appear at the top of each sent fax.
• Save faxes sent or received for up to 90 days (faxes can always be saved to the user’s computer for longer-term archival).
• MetroFax now offers numbers in the top 100 cities coast-to-coast in 48 states and Puerto Rico as well as many other cities.
• Enhanced and expanded network optimization for substantially improved transmission times.

Once you sign up for MetroFax you’ll recieve a Welcome Message.

This email will tell you how to Activate your account. Click on this link first. It takes you to a screen to change your password. This tnen takes you to a LOGIN screen where it asks for your ID and Password. One problem is they don’t tell you what your login ID is. I guessed it was the email id I signed up with and was correct. Not a big deal but something they should add to their welcome letter.

Once logged in you come to the Metrofax dashboard. The dashboard is VERY clean and easy to read. Easily one of the top interfaces I’ve seen to date.

Sending a Fax Online with MetroFax
Sending a fax is easy for up to a maximum of 50 recipients. Y ou enter the fax number the name and company name and you have the option of adding the recipient to your address book. You can also choose a fax number from your contact list. More on the contact list later.

You can add an attachment easily by browsing and easily pick from one of 5 styles of cover pages. Attachments are limited to 10MB and there are no custom cover pages, but do you really need that? If you do there are other services that offer custom fax cover pages .

Further down you can add more information for the cover page including a message. This message can be the entire fax if you are not faxing a document. If you don’t attach a file you MUST put a message on the cover page or it will not deliver the fax. But then, why would you want it too?

MetroFax now lets you send faxes direclty from Office 2007. This is a nice feature to have if you send lots of documents created in Office 2007

After that you can SEND NOW. It says Delivery options but it only offers send now.

See screen shots at the end of the article

MetroFax website

Fax Retention
Faxes are kept online for only 30 days so this is not a good service for those looking for an archive solution.
On the left column you can Clearly see how many pages you have left of your 1,000 included pages. Very nice!

User Preferences
Under  User Preferences you can set up default Name and cover page details as well as change your time zone and password.
You can choose to receive faxes in either PDF or TIFF formats as well as how you want to receive your faxes; in emial or notifications only.

Account Administration
This section of the site is fairly straight forward. You can only have ONE email id associated with MetroFax and you cannot have multiple numbers  or accounts associated with a billing account. Other services do offer multi user fax accounts .

Junk Faxes and Fax Spam
Like many Internet fax services today you can identify junk faxes and block faxes from those numbers. There is no perfect solution but being able to block numbers is better than nothing.

Email Faxing
Like all email fax services MetroFax allows you to send and receive faxes through your email.

MetroFax also offers a Outlook plugin that will add a button to your Outlook toolbar labeled FAX.

Support
Clicking on support brings you to a Support Request page with an email form. There is also an email id and three phone numbers to call, toll free, and two other non toll-free numbers. I did this review on a Saturday afternoon and got a message stating their offices are closed and to send an email to support. In fairness most problems with fax happen during the first 3-4 days of using the service and are usually due to folks doing a few little things wrong. There is a basic online support section but as mentioned, support is usually only necessary if something goes wrong with MetroFaxes back end which should be almost never.

Basic info on MetroFax
Price Plan                                        $12.95
Activation Fee                              $  9.95
Fax pages included IN & Out    1,000
Toll Free                                          $2 extra per line per month
Additional page price          3 cents per page after 1.000

New Pricing for May 2011

The $12.95 plan is still there but now MetroFax offers a 500 page plan and a 2,500 page plan for $7.95 & $35.95 a month respectively. Both are very competitive.

MetroFax.
Compare the Bottom Line. $12.95/mo includes 1000 pages/mo. $0.03 per page thereafter.

Who is this service for?
Small to medium sized businesses that need a couple of hundred to thousands of faxes a month. They offer an exceptional value for the price.  Not for businesses that need multiple accounts under one master account. The web site mentions corporate plans but I did not contact them on this. Check back soon for more info on corporate faxing from MetroFax.

Conclusion
If you use anywhere from a few to or more than 2000 fax pages a month, inbound or outbound, MetroFax is a tremendous deal. The super clean online interface is a joy to use and easy to understand. I would give this 4.0 out of 5 stars.

As they are fond of saying you should compare the bottom line. With their new plan structure MetroFax has brought their excellent payment plan structure to a lower and upper price point.  MetroFax. – $12.95/mo includes 1000 pages/mo. $0.03 per page thereafter.

New Interface Screen Shots for MetroFax. They have come a long way in making an easy to use Internet Fax service.

New Easier to Use Online Fax Dashboard

The new Inbox allows storage of up to 90 days of faxes, sorting and searching by date and multi-fax forwarding and management. Nicely done.

MetroFax Easier to Use Fax InBox

Updated for May 2011 the new outbox gives superior fax management tools to the previous version of up to 90 days of previously sent faxes.

MetroFax Sent Fax (Outbox) Interface

You can sign up for a MetroFax free trial here.