How does faxing over e-mail work?
Most people who work in office settings have at least a basic familiarity with fax machines. The concept is simple -- the fax machine scans a document, encodes the information and transmits it across the phone line. The fax machine on the other end of the line decodes the signal and prints a facsimile of the document.
Services that allow people to send faxes via e-mail work on the same principle, but a computer and the Internet take the place of a fax machine. These services assign fax numbers to their customers, and they provide a way to send documents without a fax machine.
To send a fax over e-mail:
The sender attaches a file -- like a Microsoft Word file or a scan of a paper document -- to an e-mail message through an e-mail program or a Web interface.
The sender addresses the message to the recipient's fax number. Depending on the service, the sender may also add the name of the faxing service (for example:
[email protected]).
The service translates the attachment so that a fax machine can read it.
The service sends the data across the phone line.
The recipient's fax machine decodes the data and prints the fax.
To receive a document from a traditional fax machine:
The sender dials the recipient's fax number.
The fax machine translates and transmits the data.
The service receives the data, translates it into an image file and sends it to the recipient's e-mail address.
The recipient opens the email message and the attachment and views the file.
E-mail fax services are often less expensive and more flexible than purchasing a traditional fax machine and telephone service for it.
How E-mail Works
Every day, the citizens of the Internet send each other billions of e-mail messages. If you're online a lot, you yourself may send a dozen or more e-mails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously, e-mail has become an extremely popular communication tool.
Have you ever wondered how e-mail gets from your computer to a friend halfway around the world? What is a POP3 server, and how does it hold your mail? The answers may surprise you, because it turns out that e-mail is an incredibly simple system at its core. In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at e-mail and how it works.
An E-mail Message
According to Darwin Magazine: Prime Movers, the first e-mail message was sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. Prior to this, you could only send messages to users on a single machine. Tomlinson's breakthrough was the ability to send messages to other machines on the Internet, using the @ sign to designate the receiving machine.
An e-mail message has always been nothing more than a simple text message -- a piece of text sent to a recipient. In the beginning and even today, e-mail messages tend to be short pieces of text, although the ability to add attachments now makes many messages quite long. Even with attachments, however, e-mail messages continue to be text messages -- we'll see why when we get to the section on attachments.
E-mail Clients
You've probably already received several e-mail messages today. To look at them, you use some sort of e-mail client. Many people use well-known, stand-alone clients like Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or Pegasus. People who subscribe to free e-mail services like Hotmail or Yahoo use an e-mail client that appears in a Web page. If you're an AOL customer, you use AOL's e-mail reader. No matter which type of client you're using, it generally does four things:
Shows you a list of all of the messages in your mailbox by displaying the message headers. The header shows you who sent the mail, the subject of the mail and may also show the time and date of the message and the message size.
Lets you select a message header and read the body of the e-mail message.
Let's you create new messages and send them. You type in the e-mail address of the recipient and the subject for the message, and then type the body of the message.
Lets you add attachments to messages you send and save the attachments from messages you receive.
Sophisticated e-mail clients may have all sorts of bells and whistles, but at the core, this is all that an e-mail client does.
How the Apple iCloud Works
Cloud storage is a growing tech trend. Making use of cloud computing technology, cloud storage services give you password-protected access to online storage space. You can upload files to this storage space as a backup copy of content from your hard drive, as additional space to supplement your hard drive, or just to make those files available online from other computers or mobile devices.
Apple's cloud storage product, iCloud, is designed to work seamlessly with all your Apple devices connected to the Internet. For example, you can upload photos from your iPhone and access them from your MacBook, upload music from your MacBook to listen to from your iPod Touch, or upload an important document from your Mac desktop to access from your iPad when you're on the go.
But iCloud isn't Apple's first online storage service. MobileMe was iCloud's long-standing predecessor, offering synchronization services for an annual subscription fee. MobileMe's primary purpose was to keep certain files synchronized between multiple devices. This included e-mail, contacts, calendars, browser bookmarks, photo galleries and Apple iWeb and iDisk services. Though MobileMe was tailor-made for Apple products, it also gave users the option to synchronize data from non-Apple computers.
Apple revamped MobileMe and merged its offerings into the new iCloud service. iCloud not only replaces MobileMe, it also adds features, flexibility and free service for up to 5 GB of storage space. In addition, digital products you purchase through Apple's iTunes Store are available from your iCloud account without counting against that free 5 GB. Later, we'll take a closer look at iCloud's features and pricing and how they compare to other cloud storage products.
Like its MobileMe predecessor, iCloud's biggest advantage is that it's integrated into Apple software. That makes iCloud your most convenient cloud storage option, if all your computers and mobile devices are Apple products. Apps you use in both Mac OS X and Apple iOS can connect to your iCloud space and automatically store your data there, including your contacts list and photo gallery. Also like MobileMe, this can expand to include Apple devices used by other family members, too. With iCloud, you can ensure your data is continuously synchronized among your Apple devices while they're connected to the Internet.
Apple iCloud Service
iCloud's features give you access to your data, from important contacts to fun photos, anywhere you're connected to the Internet. Here's how you can access iCloud from different types of devices:
Apple mobile devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch) running iOS 5 or newer will connect to the iCloud storage associated with your Apple ID. Then, iOS and other apps capable of saving data to iCloud will automatically synchronize that data while you're connected to the Internet.
Apple computers running Mac OS X Lion (10.7) or newer can run apps programmed to synchronize with iCloud storage.
All Apple computers can view, upload and download iCloud storage contents using the Web app at icloud.com. The look and feel of the icloud.com Web site resembles the default Apple iOS interface.
You can authorize up to 10 devices to access and use iCloud with your Apple ID. This is a leap beyond the iTunes Store authorization, which is limited to five devices. Plus, iCloud authorization extends beyond iTunes to touch all apps capable of connecting and use iCloud from that device. Developers program each app to connect to and use iCloud content in its own way, so check an app's help pages to find out whether and how it can use iCloud. If you're one of those developers, check out how your app creations can use the iCloud application programming interfaces (APIs) as described at the Apple developer site.
Besides its options for apps to connect to and use the service, iCloud features unlimited free storage for anything you purchase through the iTunes Store. This means that any music, movies, TV shows, books or apps you purchase from iTunes don't count against your free 5 GB of iCloud storage space. In addition, each iTunes purchase is instantly available for download to any of your iCloud-authorized devices, as long as the songs are available from the iTunes store. In short, buy it once, access it everywhere. This even applies to purchases you made under the same Apple ID long before iCloud existed, provided they're still available in the iTunes Store.