Fax to Email — Receive Faxes in Your Inbox as PDFs
Fax to email means you keep a real fax number without keeping a fax machine: anything sent to your number arrives in your inbox as a PDF, usually within a minute of the sending machine hanging up. Send FAX Mail receives the call on a dedicated number you own, converts the transmission to a PDF, stores it, and emails it to you and up to five other addresses you nominate. Receiving needs a dedicated number, so it starts on the $12.99/mo Starter plan rather than the 7-day trial, which is send-only. On HIPAA-tier plans the PDF is deliberately never attached — you get a notification and download it from your dashboard session instead.
Plan requirement
Receiving requires a dedicated fax number, which the 7-day trial does not include — the trial is send-only from a shared number. Starter ($12.99/mo) includes 1 number, Professional ($39.99/mo) 3, Business ($79.99/mo) 5, and Enterprise ($169.99/mo) 10. Received pages count against the same monthly page allowance as sends, reconciled from the real page count once the transmission completes.
How it works
A sending machine dials the number assigned to your account and the carrier answers, negotiates, and completes the transmission on your behalf. Our webhook receives the finished document, stores the PDF, and creates a record against your account before any email goes out. What lands in your inbox depends on your tier: standard accounts get the PDF attached directly, while HIPAA-tier accounts get a notification carrying a dashboard link and no attachment, so the document is only ever opened inside an authenticated session. There is a third path worth knowing about — a fax too large to attach falls back to the same link-only email on any tier, so an oversized document is never silently dropped. Filtering runs before any of this: if the sending number matches your junk rules, the fax is dropped without an email and without a bounce back to the sender.
What you can do
- ✓Receive faxes as PDF attachments on a dedicated number you own
- ✓Copy each incoming fax to as many as five extra email addresses per number
- ✓Withhold the attachment automatically on HIPAA tiers and deliver a dashboard link instead
- ✓Block junk senders by exact number or area-code prefix before an email is ever sent
- ✓Auto-label incoming faxes per number, or suppress the email and take the webhook only
- ✓Triage what arrived at /dashboard/inbox with unread, starred, and archived states
- ✓Mirror every received PDF into your own S3-compatible storage bucket
Setup steps
- 1Subscribe to a plan that includes a number — receiving is not part of the send-only trial
- 2Verify your email address, then order a number from /dashboard/numbers
- 3Add any extra recipients for that number under its delivery settings, up to five
- 4Give the number out; the first fax to arrive lands in your inbox as a PDF
- 5Open /dashboard/inbox to mark it read, star it, or archive it once handled
- 6Add junk rules under settings if unwanted senders start dialing the number
Example
Incoming call → your dedicated number
Transmission → 3 pages, converted to PDF and stored
Standard plan → email with fax-3pages.pdf attached
HIPAA plan → email with a dashboard link, no attachment
Extra copies → up to 5 addresses you set per numberFax to Email — FAQ
No, and this is the one limit worth checking before signing up to receive. The trial is send-only from a shared number, and receiving requires a dedicated number assigned to your account, so it begins on a paid plan. Starter includes one number at $12.99/mo. If your reason for signing up is that someone needs to fax you, start on a paid plan rather than the trial.
Two situations produce a link instead of an attachment. On Professional, Business, and Enterprise plans the attachment is withheld by design, because those tiers are treated as carrying protected health information and the document should only be opened inside an authenticated session. Separately, on any tier, a fax too large to attach is delivered as a dashboard link so an oversized document is not lost.
You can nominate up to five extra addresses per number, in addition to the account owner, so a shared line can reach a whole team without anyone sharing a login. The tier rule still governs the format for every recipient: if the account is on a HIPAA tier, each of those addresses receives the link-only notification, never the PDF, so adding a recipient cannot become a way around the no-attachment rule.
Yes. Pages you receive draw on the same monthly allowance as pages you send, counted from the real page count once the transmission finishes rather than estimated up front. A 600-page Starter allowance is therefore shared between both directions. If your line mostly receives, size the plan against expected inbound volume instead of assuming the allowance covers sending only.
Yes, with a per-account filter that runs before delivery. You can list numbers to block outright, or invert it into an allow-only list, and entries match either an exact number or an area-code prefix. A fax that matches a block rule is dropped quietly and recorded for later review, with no email to you and no bounce to the sender, so an automated junk broadcaster gets no signal that the line is live.
Build with the Fax to Email
API access and webhooks are included on the Business and Enterprise plans. Create a key at /dashboard/developers and start sending.
7-day free trial · No credit card required