No more busy signals - JFax Personal Telecom voice messaging and fax service - Company Business and Marketing

Home Office Computing, July, 1997 by David Haskin

JFax Prsonal Telecom

RATING: ***

WIN 95 / WIN

Whether you juggle all your business calls on one phone line or split your modem and fax machines off on a second line, you'll eventually find there comes a time when clients can't reach you. They fax you while you're online. They call you when you're pitching a prospective client. Your phone company's voice-mail system captures phone calls, but what about those errant faxes?

JFax Personal Telecom is a sometimes-expensive but very flexible service that always lets you receive faxes and voice mail--without adding an additional line. And unlike the phone company's voice mail, these messages show up as attachments in your e-mail in-box just as soon as the Internet can deliver them.

After signing up, we received our own toll-free JFax number (which doesn't mean free of charge), although cheaper nontoll numbers are available in some metropolitan areas (a competing service, iPost, promises to offer more extensive local connection numbers by partnering with Internet service providers). We used our number to receive faxes and obtained "rollover" service for $5 per month from our phone company, which sends voice calls to JFax when we're on our line. As with any voice-mail service, we also created our own greeting. When we were on the phone or online, our phone company forwarded incoming faxes and voice messages to JFax, which sent them to us as e-mail attachments.

JFax works with Internet and America Online e-mail. It should also work with CompuServe by the time you read this. The first messages we received included JFax's free fax viewer and voice message player. We installed the programs and then double-clicked on all new attachments to view faxes and hear voice messages. Unfortunately, subject lines of incoming messages only included the time and date without describing the message's contents, which makes finding specific messages difficult. At the very least, we want to be able to read the message's first sentence.

If you work in a metropolitan area such as New York or Los Angeles where JFax offers local numbers, the service will be less expensive than adding another line. JFax's toll-free access for more remote locales, however, will cost more than adding another dedicated line. Still, JFax is more convenient than an answering machine. The service takes messages when we're on the phone, turns our e-mail program into a universal in-box for all messages, and simplifies retrieving messages when we travel.

DETAILS

JFax Personal Telecom

Service Provider: JFax, 888-438-5329, www.jfax.com

Price: $15 activation fee ($30 for toll-free service); $12.50 per month for 100 messages, 20 cents for each additional message, 25 cents per message for all messages to toll4ree service)

Requirements: Rollover service from your local phone company (suggested), e-mail service with Mime support, 16-bit sound card and speakers for voice messages