Whether you have a RingCentral Fax, RingCentral Professional or RingCentral Office plan, you have the ability to send and receive faxes using your RingCentral account.
You can use a variety of devices to send a RingCentral fax. That means your communiques aren’t anchored to a physical fax machine – although, if you have a RingCentral-provisioned analog telephone adapter (ATA), you can use a fax machine, too!
What are the four ways you can fax with RingCentral?
1. FaxOut
FaxOut makes it possible to fax through the RingCentral online interface. Using a PC or Mac, log in to your RingCentral account at http://service.ringcentral.com and click the FaxOut link on the top-right corner of the page. You’ll see this window pop up:
Enter one or more fax numbers and attach the files you want to send. Then click Send Now. That’s it!
2. CloudFax
CloudFax is similar to FaxOut, in that it sends faxes through the web. But it has one cool feature that FaxOut doesn’t: the ability to attach documents directly from cloud-storage services. CloudFax – available at http://cloudfax.ringcentral.com – integrates with Google Drive, Box and Dropbox, so you can attach any files you’ve stored with those platforms to your RingCentral faxes in a snap.
You may need to authorize CloudFax to access your file libraries in Drive, Box and Dropbox before using this integration feature. You should only have to complete the authorization process once.
3. Email-to-fax
With email-to-fax, you can send a fax from your email inbox! To enable email-to-fax for your email address – you can add as many as 5 addresses per RingCentral extension – visit the RingCentral online interface at http://service.ringcentral.com and click Settings > My Settings. Then select Outbound Fax Settings at the bottom. You’ll see a “Faxes Sent via Email” section; add your personal email addresses here to be able to send faxes from those addresses. Make sure to click Save when you’re done adding.
To send an email-to-fax message, just enter the ten-digit number [at] rcfax.com (e.g., 2125558989@rcfax.com) in the To: field.
4. Softphone
The RingCentral softphone is available as a free download for all RingCentral customers. (It’s in the online interface – click Tools > Softphone to download it.)
Once you’ve installed the softphone on your Mac or Windows computer, simply log in with your extension info. You’ll be able to see your received faxes in one place – and you can easily create a new fax by clicking the “Create and send a fax” button.
One cool feature unique to the softphone is the fax editor. Available in the new-fax window (look for the Edit button), the editor lets you tweak your cover letters as you see fit.