WinFax Pro 10.0: Better With Age

Sending and receiving faxes with your PC is easy enough with most fax software, but the unrivalled flexibility and intelligence of Symantec's WinFax Pro have long set it apart from the crowd. The just-released version 10.0, priced at $120, adds several welcome new features, along with support for Windows 2000, that make the package worth its price tag. For business or high-volume fax users who want integration with existing contact managers, WinFax Pro is the package to beat.

Fax by E-Mail

Key among WinFax Pro's new features is the ability to send faxes through e-mail, which lets you send fax documents to those without a fax machine. You simply initiate a fax using WinFax Pro, enter the recipient's e-mail address, and then choose to send via e-mail. The program then turns the fax into an e-mail attachment that includes a self-executing 60KB viewer. This convenient approach means any recipient can read the incoming fax, without having WinFax Pro installed or--as is the case with some of the free, advertising-supported Internet fax services--downloading a separate viewer. It also means that you can send documents that retain their look and feel, no matter what software the recipient's system has.

To display the fax, the recipient double-clicks on the file icon included with the e-mail message. If the recipient has WinFax Pro installed, the attachment is automatically opened in WinFax Pro. The program's Internet mail feature works with any SMTP or POP3 mail service, as well as with network-based e-mail packages such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.

The most important improvement for people who make heavy use of computer-based faxing may be WinFax Pro's expanded support for seamless integration with the address books of popular contact managers and databases. The list of supported apps includes: dBASE III+; Interact Commerce's Act 4.0 and 2000; Goldmine Software's Goldmine 4.0 and 5.0; Lotus Organizer 4.x, 5.x, and 97; Microsoft Access; and Microsoft Outlook Express 98 and 2000 (as well as the full-fledged Outlook 98 and 2000).

During installation, WinFax Pro automatically searches for those programs on your hard drive, and establishes direct access to any associated address books it finds--saving you the trouble of building a new, separate address book within WinFax Pro. It creates a live link to data contained within your contact manager, so any changes you make in that application are reflected in WinFax Pro. You can also import ASCII data, as well as data from previous versions of WinFax Pro.

Also new to version 10.0 is a photo-quality mode, which does a better job of reproducing illustrations and photographs than the conventional fax mode does. When set to photo-quality mode, WinFax simulates various levels of gray by altering the dot pattern and the spacing between dots. You won't mistake a faxed photograph for the real thing, but neither will you mistake it for a Rorschach test. The drawback of photo-quality mode is its sluggish performance: During our tests, faxing a three-page document with one half-page photograph took 4 minutes, 52 seconds in photo-quality mode, and only 2 minutes, 16 seconds in normal mode.

Other notable improvements include the ability to initiate a fax by dragging and dropping files from Windows Explorer to WinFax Pro, improved dialing flexibility for cities with multiple area codes, the ability to store incoming and outgoing faxes as separate files in any subdirectory, and a mechanism for automatically deleting future faxes from known junk-fax phone numbers. Of course, version 10.0 also offers most of the features of versions past, such as the ability to have your system notify your pager when you receive a fax.