Is the floor by your fax machine littered with paper every morning? Do your clients get a busy signal when they try to send you a fax? Do you wish there was a way to receive confidential faxes, away from the entire office's eyes? And do you want to be able to send and receive faxes on the road?

Try e-mail.

I don't mean you should tell your clients to get with the program and e-mail you instead of using an archaic fax machine. I'm referring to a whole slew of Internet-based fax services that have sprung up over the last few years. Through e-mail, these services can replace the fax line in your office and those outrageously priced fax services at hotels when you're traveling.

The concept behind these Web-based services is pretty simple. When you sign up with an electronic service like j2 Global Communications (www.j2.com), CallWave (www.callwave.com), or Intellifax.com, to name just a few, you're assigned a personal fax number that allows you to receive faxes as file attachments to your e-mail.

That means that your confidential faxes don't lie around for other people to see, and no one sending you a fax ever gets a busy signal. And while you may not have to deal with an overflowing fax tray, you may have to deal with an overflowing e-mail inbox. You can, however, divvy up incoming faxes by introducing different fax numbers for different departments in your office.

Web-based fax services don't just let you receive faxes - you can send and forward them to other fax numbers as well. You will still need to hang on to your fax machine to easily send print documents, though.

Web-based fax services usually come in two flavors: a free version intended for receiving faxes, and a paid version that allows you to both send and receive faxes for about $10 to $20 a month and a sending cost of about 5 cents a page. Unless you get the paid version, be aware that your fax number can be assigned randomly, and be for a number outside your area code.

You can usually specify the area code for your fax numbers under the paid model; a special corporate version with multiple fax numbers, which would be handy if you have a mobile sales force, may require a small set-up fee and per-user monthly costs.

Don't hold your breath for wireless access to these Web services just yet, though. Wireless features still seem a little shaky, mainly because cell phones and handhelds cannot usually handle e-mail attachments.

When a service does offer wireless access, it's usually only to show you information about an incoming fax. You can't view the fax itself, and must forward it through your Web-enabled cell phone or handheld to the nearest fax machine to get a hard copy.

If you're not ready to ditch your trusty fax machine just yet, give a free version of an Internet fax service a try. You may just be pleasantly surprised.