Receive voicemail and fax through internet for free in the US

Although we are living in an age of internet and text messages, occasionally we do need to be communicated with voice messages or faxes. For many people like me that do not have a landline phone at home, this can be difficult. In other situations, e.g., for privacy reason, we do not want to release our home phone number, it will be very convenient if we can receive voicemails and faxes through internet. In addition, it is much easier to keep an electronic copy of the fax than keeping the paper copy, not to mention redistribution is effortless with the electronic copy.

To my surprise, I came across this free service that provides a phone number in the US for us to receive voicemails and faxes. It is a real phone number, not an extension number! k7.net forwards voicemails and faxes to any email address that you specify. If you have control over your email accounts, you can also set up an alias that forwards incoming emails to multiple actual email addresses. If you are running a small business, you can set up an alias called fax@yourdomain and forward emails to all of your users. Sign up is very simple.

There are 2 limitations with this free service - (1) it assigns you a Washington State phone number, (2) it expires if there is no activity in 30 days.

One issue that you need to watch out is the format of the fax is TIFF that supports non-square pixels. Most fax machines send out images using these non-square pixels which makes the images look odd (wide and short). Gmail users can view (not the preview image when you read the email) these files online without any distortion and the default image viewer coming with Microsoft Windows can view them. I believe IrfanView also supports this format. As far as I can tell, for Linux users Okular and Evince can also display them correctly. Other OSes or viewers may have trouble with these images. The trick I use to assure compatibility is to convert the TIFF file to PDF using ImageMagick. This tool is included in almost every Linux distribution and can be installed on other OSes as well.