Adventures with Internet Faxing

I have eschewed the traditional PSTN line in favour of VoIP. This has worked out reasonably well for me although I had some hiccups configuring my router for VoIP initially. I've been forced to learn a bit more about VoIP and I will have to learn even more about it soon as I attempt FoIP (Fax over the VoIP line). As and when I manage to set up my new Brother multi-function printer which seemed to have connected to my wireless network but doesn't appear as a printer service on my laptop. This funky new printer can fax/scan/print up to A3 size and is supposedly accessible over the wireless and 10 T-Base wired LAN (Local Area Network) and USB2.0.

Any how, I've had enough of mucking around with the hardware and I needed to send off a fax pronto. Great time to trial some of these Internet Fax services. I signed up with utbox. At 15c per page, they're kind of expensive but given my current fax volume and the convenience I get, it isn't too bad.

Set up with utbox was a breeze but then came actual faxing. I kept getting #5.0.1 address rejected messages. At first I thought the fax number I copied down was wrong, so I tried a friendly mate's fax number which was known to work. No such luck. Then I tried e-mail faxing through my gmail account. That went through so I figured that Mozilla Thunderbird and/or Internode (my ISP) was the problem. Anyway, that's a puzzle to be solved another time. I'm just glad my ordeal is over for now.