eFax vs Email: What You Should Know

Phishing attacks via email account for 90% of all data breaches. That’s a scary statistic, but it doesn’t have to be your reality. Instead of relying on email, you can turn to online faxing services, like eFax. Online faxing offers an easy way to send and receive faxes without risking your sensitive information.

You can benefit from a safe, secure and easy way to send or receive faxes. With eFax, you can rest assured that your information is safe.

Read on to learn more about online faxing and how it can benefit you.

Table of Contents

• The World’s Reliance on Email
• Email Offers a Wealth of Information—For Hackers
• Email is Vulnerable to Phishing Attacks
• Online Faxes: Safe, Secure and Reliable
• Encryption Makes Online Faxing Secure
• The Built-in Value of Online Faxing
• Start Faxing Now

The World’s Reliance on Email

Email has become the cornerstone of business communication. It’s the most common way we communicate with each other today.

For most people, email takes up more time than any other app. However, many people don’t know that it isn’t a safe way to send and receive information unless you take specific steps.

More than just a personal-use tool, email is commonplace in organizations, which creates an environment of complacency. Since email attachments can often have spyware or other malware injected into them, proprietary information is at risk when sent via email.

Is Email Communication Effective?

Because of the substantial hacking problems that make headlines regularly, many companies have put in powerful filters that scan and send messages to junk or spam mailboxes. For this reason, an email recipient may wait for an attachment that never shows up.

Often, attachments get filtered because of simple oversights. For instance, the attachment is too big, has the wrong name or many other reasons. When these filters mistakenly think an email is spam, these events are “false positives.” While filtering can protect organizations from hacking attempts, it can hurt employees’ productivity, make a project late or even ruin sales opportunities.

Online faxing eliminates these issues. Suppose you send a document using online fax. In that case, it won’t get flagged by a spam filter, and the recipient will receive the document.

To send documents that someone must look at quickly, you should send them by fax instead of email. You can rest assured knowing your communication will get to the intended person with faxing. With email, however, there are no such guarantees.

You can even send urgent faxes easily while you’re on the go using our eFax Mobile App.

Email Offers a Wealth of Information—For Hackers

When organizations send documents, they don’t want them to get intercepted and end up in the hands of the wrong people. A transmission breach can give hackers access to personal information like phone numbers, social security numbers and financial records. Hackers can then do whatever they want with this information.

Hackers can also steal business secrets, costing a company millions of dollars. For example, inadvertently revealing customer records can make customers or partners angry and even cause lawsuits.

Email is Vulnerable to Phishing Attacks

The biggest weakness of email is phishing attacks. They typically come in emails that look like they come from a trusted source, but malicious actors use them to steal all sorts of data.

Sometimes hackers are happy to get your personal and credit card information for money. Other times, however, they send phishing emails to obtain login credentials or additional information that they can use in more malicious attacks against a few people or a single company.

Getting into your online accounts and personal data can lead to hackers getting permission to change and compromise connected systems. This can give bad actors opportunities to hack critical systems—such as point-of-sale terminals or order processing technology. A hack can even paralyze an entire corporate network or steal data. What’s more, some hackers may charge you a ransom to restore your data and not return all your information even if you pay.

One of the best ways to protect your organization against phishing is using a secure fax service like eFax.

Online Faxes: Safe, Secure and Reliable

Imagine a malicious actor breaks into an email account. In that case, they can get into any other account linked to that email address unless you’ve protected the accounts with two-factor authentication. By contrast, online fax is less likely to get hacked by people who use social engineering, like phishing, to get into your computer.

It’s not hard to get someone to click a link in an email. However, it’s extremely difficult for hackers to use this method to trick someone into giving away their passwords or other vital information with a fax machine. Online faxing is far more secure than email for almost every use case. It’s safe because it’s not as easy to compromise as an email.

Encryption Makes Online Faxing Secure

Why is online faxing more secure than email? The technology encrypts fax messages at every step. Encryption scrambles content and makes it non-sensical to anyone who doesn’t have a decryption key. Many email services, however, don’t use end-to-end encryption. This means that people other than the intended recipients can read the contents of the email, exposing your network to various kinds of cyberattacks.

The Built-in Value of Online Faxing

Fax is the winner between fax and email when it comes to efficiency. Most email services don’t have built-in features that let you check to see if you’ve successfully sent or delivered your messages. Conversely, you’ll only get a failure notification— known as a “bounce back”—when sending an email if you message a nonexistent address.

Faxing, especially online faxing, automatically tells you when you’ve successfully sent a communication. You can easily see which faxes you’ve sent successfully in real-time.

Also, an online fax service allows you to download and print transmission receipts. Transmission receipts are handy, especially when you need to record what you’ve sent to a recipient. At eFax, we even enable you to send faxes right from your workstation easily using our proprietary eFax Messenger interface.

Getting More for Your Investment in Communication

Faxes again have the upper hand over emails in terms of storage space. Most email services don’t offer free online storage when you sign up for an account. If you want more storage space, you’ll have to pay extra. Unfortunately, paying for more storage space isn’t cheap. In fact, most of the time, it’s pretty expensive.

With online faxing, you can store much more information. For instance, at eFax, we’ll give you free online storage at an affordable price. Also, as long as you have a subscription, you’ll get free online cloud storage.

In general, having free online storage is better. This means that you can store documents in the cloud without worrying about how much space you have on your devices. Many businesses and large companies use this feature regularly, as it’s beneficial for high-volume faxing needs.

Making document signing easy

Every day, business professionals need to get signatures on critical documentation, such as contracts or non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). This isn’t easy to accomplish by email, especially if you have a hard copy document that needs to be signed.

You’ll need to scan the hard copy, send it to a device and upload it to email to get the document out the door. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get any easier on the recipients’ end. All the people who need to sign it will need to use an external tool. That can mean downloading the document, uploading it into another solution to add a signature, then downloading it again and uploading it to email. Because of the multiple steps involved, some people may not put forth the effort to sign documents—and this can lead to missed opportunities.

By contrast, our online fax service simplifies the process of signature collection. If you need to send a hard copy document via fax, all you must do is put the document on a connected company copier and press a few keys. Our online fax app also has built-in scanner and e-signature tools.

Start Faxing Now

eFax has served as a leader in online faxing for more than 20 years. We make it effortless to send and receive faxes from your computer, phone or tablet in just a few minutes. Also, we have local, toll-free and international phone numbers available for your use.

eFax has a wide range of complete internet fax solutions tailored to your needs, and we can even help you choose the right one.