eFax And The Anti-Support
October 9, 2001

I rarely receive faxes, but when I do, they're important. I didn't want to have to dedicate a phone line or set up fancy routing, so I was delighted when (back in the spring), I found a service called eFax. eFax provides you with a fax number and emails you any faxes it recieves - free of charge (obviously, there's a premium service and add-ons that you can pay for - they've gotta make money somewhere). At any rate, it seemed like a great service and filled the void with exactly what I needed.

Recently (read: today), I had a little change of heart.

Setting aside my other beefs with eFax (ie., their proprietary format - why can't you just send me a PDF?), today they reached a pinnacle of stupidity I never thought I'd see.

On Friday, I was supposed to receive a fax from Q9, our hosting company (They're great; I highly recommend them). It didn't show up in my email.

Today I logged in to eFax to see what was up. Sure enough, the fax had been received on Friday - so why hadn't I received it? After a little digging, I realized I was an idiot: my eFax profile still had an old email address, which is no longer valid. I quickly updated the profile, a headed back to the fax listing.

Obviously, the fax had been emailed, and probably bounced. All I needed now was to re-send it to my working email, and I'd be on my merry way.

If only it were that easy.

Normally, you'd think eFax would build into their software the ability to re-send any faxes that had been received. People lose/delete/misplace email all the time, and it would only make sense to account for this. I'm sure I'm not the first to want another copy of a fax.

eFax doesn't have this feature.

OK, fine. I'll email their Customer Support and ask them about it, and get them to re-send it. The following is a text of my (form-generated from their page) email:

From: Darryl Ballantyne
eFax Number: 509-753-9905
Pin: xxxx
Company:
Email: darryl@lyricfind.com
Phone: (519)897-7321

Subject: Problems Receiving eFax Attachment

Hi,

Recently I received a fax via eFax, but it wasn't emailed to me. When I checked my account info, I realized that my profile contained an old email address that is no longer valid. I've updated the email address, but still need to get that fax that came in (On Oct. 5) - could it be emailed again to the new email address?

Thanks,

Darryl

Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently not. Here is the response I received, minutes later:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting eFax.com Support.

Faxes are sent to you as file attachment within your email. Each email client deals with attachments differently but usually double-clicking on the attachment will initiate accessing the attachment. If your email client gives you a choice between opening and saving to disk, you should choose open attachment and this will launch the Messenger and display the fax. If you only have the Save option, then allow the program to save to disk, noting the name of the file and the directory where your program saves the files. Then use Windows Explorer to navigate to that directory and double-click on the saved file (in the form AAnnnnn.EFX). This will open the fax.

If you have attempted to open a fax without the Messenger being installed properly you may have associated the wrong program to open the fax. In this case install eFax Messenger again using the information provided above.

If you have any questions about how to use the eFax Messenger refer to our "How To" page at http://www.efax.com/help for further details.

Sincerely,
eFax.com Support Team

An automated reply. Wonderful. Not only does it not even come CLOSE to answering my question, but it doesn't even resemble a proper automated response for the CATEGORY ("Problems Receiving eFax Attachment") of my inquiry! (For the record, there is another category entitled "Problems Opening/Downloading Attachments" for which this response might apply.)

Now, eFax (or, well, their parent company, J2) probably thinks they're doing me a favour by sending me this automated response.

They're not.

I'd much rather have waited for a while and gotten an appropriate response than gotten this instantaneous, useless garbage. All they've succeeded in doing is annoying me to no end, and eliminating any chance of me ever upgrading to their pay services. Aside from that, they've also gotten me to write this, which many people will read, spreading the bad word.

Please, eFax. Get your act together. Make your service more user-friendly, and make your Support actually be helpful. A slow useful response is infinitely better than a quick useless response.

If anyone knows of any alternative services to eFax, please let me know.

UPDATE (October 10, 2001): The eFax saga continues. Go ahead and read Part Two: The eFax Emails.