Your landlord in Lisbon, a clinic in Montreal, or the notary handling your late aunt's house in Italy has asked for a fax. You have a laptop, no fax machine, and an office that closed hours ago in the place you need to reach. This is a more common spot to be in than you would think, and it is fixable in about five minutes if you prepare properly. Here is how it works from the US side of the Atlantic.
Before anything else: CaptainFax delivers to landlines in Canada, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, and it cannot fax numbers within the United States. That makes this guide useful to Americans, expats and companies who send paperwork to Canada or Europe.
Get these four things ready
1. Get your document into one file. A send holds one file, 100 MB at most, and PDF is the safest format. Photos (JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF or AVIF files), plain text, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and RTF are accepted as well, with anything other than a PDF converted first. For a pile of scans, merge them into one PDF. Both macOS and Windows offer "Save as PDF" in any print dialog.
2. The exact fax number. Get it in writing from the recipient. European and Canadian offices often list a reception line and a fax line side by side, and mixing them up is the number one reason a fax goes nowhere. You can run the number through our number checker before you send.
3. A landline. Mobile numbers cannot receive faxes. If all you have is a cell number, ask for the office landline. The destination pages list each supported country.
4. An inbox you can open right now. Nothing leaves until you click the link in the confirmation e-mail.
A note on paper size
Your document is probably Letter size (8.5 by 11 inches). Europe uses A4, which is slightly narrower and taller, and Canada uses Letter like you do. Fit-to-page when you export your PDF and keep a margin of at least half an inch on every side, so nothing near the edge gets clipped when the receiving machine prints on A4. Check the last line of each page after exporting.
The five minutes
- Complete the form on the home page. Select the destination country, enter the fax number, attach the file and type your e-mail address. There is no account and no password.
- Check the price. One-page faxes cost nothing, however many you send. Longer documents are billed €3.99 per send, a flat fee whatever the length. As this is written, that is about what a coffee costs. If you want to be certain, the estimator on the rates page turns a page count into a price.
- Open the confirmation e-mail and click the link. That step keeps anyone from sending a fax by accident with your address on it.
- Use the short countdown. It is your final chance to close the tab if you notice a typo. Paid sends are charged by card through Stripe.
- Watch the tracking page. It refreshes live as the fax is dialed and transmitted, then shows how it ended.
- Order receipts if you want them. For €2.99 you get a request receipt and a transmission receipt as PDFs, and you pay only if the fax is delivered. The delivery proof page explains what is in them.
Where it goes wrong
Time zones. This is the big one for US senders. Paris is six hours ahead of New York in most of the year, and nine ahead of Los Angeles. An office that closes at 5 p.m. in Madrid is already shut by the time you finish lunch in Chicago. Look at the world clock on the site, and send during the recipient's working day. Daylight saving changes happen on different dates in the US and Europe, so the gap shifts for a few weeks each spring and fall.
Dialing habits. Americans dial 011 for international calls and a leading 1 for long distance. Neither belongs in the number you type here: the country is chosen separately. Read our guide to number formats around Europe before you copy a number from a European letterhead, because those often show a zero in brackets that must not be dialed.
Busy line. Small offices often share one line for the phone and the fax. If the tracking page reports a failure, wait twenty minutes and try again.
Unreadable pages. Fax transmission is black and white at modest resolution. Light gray text, yellow highlighter and fine print do not survive. Zoom the page to 100 percent before sending: if it looks marginal, it will look worse on the other end. Body text at 11 points or larger is a good floor.
Wrong page order. Flip through the final PDF once. Ten seconds, no regrets.
Pre-flight checklist
- One file, pages in order, readable at actual size, margins at least half an inch.
- Number confirmed in writing by the recipient.
- Landline in one of the seven supported countries.
- Local time at the destination falls within office hours.
- Cover sheet added if the fax lands on a shared machine; the cover sheet generator takes about a minute.
- Your inbox is open for the confirmation link.
FAQ
Can I fax a number in the United States?
No. The service reaches landlines in Canada, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and France. It also assigns no fax number to you and can’t take incoming faxes.
Do I need an account or a subscription?
Neither. You fill in the form, confirm by e-mail, and the fax goes out. Pricing is per send.
What if the fax fails?
The tracking page shows the outcome. Verify the number and the recipient's office hours, then send again. The answers page covers the common causes.
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