I recently needed to set up a fax service for my business. Hardly anyone I deal with uses fax, but for the occasional client that is in to fax I needed it in place. I have a multi-function printer that can handle this, but I honestly did not feel like giving the phone company an extra ounce of money to have a dedicated line, for a service that I would not use more than a few times a year. Almost all of my SEO clients are fine with swapping PDF proposals and even signed contracts if necessary.

It had been a while since I checked out online fax services. I know that there are several out there that have good reputations, and several that have great prices. I was looking for both — a fine mixture of price and service. My decision was ultimately based on the basic services that were must haves

Basic Services

The particular services I was looking for in an online fax service included:

• Toll-free number – I think I can spring for the cost, if I am getting a client to fax a signed contract back to me
• Complete web interface – I was not looking to have to install some desktop app. I want to be able to get to my faxes or send faxes even if I was not using my laptop (almost never happens, but occasionally when I go to the beach it does)
• Safe online storage – On the chance I lose a fax, I wanted to have an online location to retrieve the fax again
• Digital signature – I wanted to be able to store my digital signature online to send back in a fax
• PDF delivery – I store most of my corporate documents in PDF format, so this was the desired delivery method.

Internet Fax Services

The 3 services that I spent the most time looking at were:

• eFax – They offer a free 30 day trial! You can get a local or toll-free fax number. Of course they allow you to send and receive faxes by email.
• Trustfax – Like eFax, the also offer a free trial. The plans they have fit my specific needs quite well and I ultimately chose them. I prepaid for a year, just under $100 for a toll-free account, and have plenty of capacity for my faxing needs
• MyFax – MyFax actually offered the next most favorite solution for me, and I think I may have been fine with choosing them. It was a coinflip between MyFax and Trustfax. I thought about either their free sign and their buy two months get one free.

Solution

As mentioned in the list of online fax services that I looked at, I chose Trustfax. Again it was strictly because TrustFax was the most like what I wanted. I think I would have been just as happy with MyFax, but you have to make a decision sooner or later.

By killing my time, I mean that I sometimes go overboard and don’t really grasp how much time an activity is consuming until it’s too late (missing other deadlines — a natural outcome for a procrastinator). I am going to try to keep using Twitter enough to really get a grasp on the power of tweeting, but stop short of just tweeting and reading tweets all day (or at least for hours on end).

You can check out my tweeting, critique my tweets, and follow me if you like!

So I searched for a Office 2007 conversion utility and found that Microsoft had one. Sweet, they are good for something. Wait a minute! The download link on the Microsoft site pointed to a 404. Now how humorous is that? Very in my mind, but my giggling at the Microsoft 404 did nothing to help me get the image out of the file and thus complete my project — it was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Ding dang!

So, on I searched (over hill and dale) . Finally, I found an obscure blog posting about docx files, and found that they are nothing more than a clever compressed file. According to the article, if you changed the extension to .zip, you could open the resulting file in any of the popular compression tools (e.g., WinZip , Winrar). Could it be that simple?

Since I did not need any text out of the document, just an embedded image, I gave it a try. I renamed the file to a .zip, opened up my licensed copy of WinZip (I support shareware), and voila! My image file was listed in the archive as clear as day beside all of the XML files that are used by Office 2007 to save your file. My guess is that I may have even been able to pull out text based content had there been any present.

Granted, this tip may not help you in all cases. I’d say that it is a good stopgap should you need a last minute solution though.

Amazingly though, I’ve not been one to use quick keystrokes to accomplish simple tasks in Thunderbird until just last week.  Now I’m a use Thunderbird with mouse in right hand (I’m left handed — go figure), and left hand on the keyboard.  When I come in to see a nice nights worth of emails I now can scan through and clean up in just a matter of minutes. No, these keystrokes are not magic, and yes, I am an idiot for not seeing them sooner.  But nonetheless, here are my new found gems to use in the email list panel.  Instead of right clicking a message or group of messages and clicking on the desired contextual menu option, just highlight the message of choice, and press one of these keys (not an all inclusive list — just the ones I like), and your message is handled:

• J = junk (presto gone-Oh)
• M = mark as read (especially useful for a large group of messages that you want to keep but not have show up as unread)
• Shift-J = not junk (for finding the straggler messages that got marked as junk)
• Shift-M = mark as unread (for keeping the important message that you want to spend more time on highlighted)
• Ctrl-R = reply (I know you can click just as quick, but once you get used to using your digits, this is habit forming)

Oh yes, there are tons more.  And yes, any moron with a brain can look at the menus to find these.  But I just get so used to point-click that I often forget that sometimes a simple finger press on the keyboard is just as productive.