You’ve got to love free fax and voicemail support! I have used this service extensively to receive faxes and voicemail. The best part is that it works with existing tools, thus not requiring a proprietary application. In addition, you don’t need a second phone line.

Here is what I did:

  1. Register for a free jconnect account
  2. Program the physical fax machine to display the jconnect fax number.

Sending faxes using my existing phone line only ties it up for a short period of time. People receiving my faxes see the fax as having come from my jconnect number and will thus fax back to it should the need arise.

Sign up for the “jconnect free” service and you get your own phone number to receive voicemails and faxes at.
http://www.j2.com/jconnect/twa/page/pricingComparison

Faxes come to you as an email attachment that can be viewed with evince. Evince is usually used to handle pdfs, but it can handle these files too.

$ evince d342sr2.jfx

To listen to voicemails you must convert the gsm file to a format your audio player can handle. The most universal format you’ll find on linux is vorbis (.ogg) and it is easily done with a simple utility called sox that comes with most Linux distros.

$ sox -V -t gsm d21cbc47.gsm voicemail.ogg

Using your favorite audio player, listen to the file:

$ xmms voicemail.ogg

Update 2010-01-12: it appears that the free service I’ve always used is no longer being offered as described in the “comparison chart” with one option.  I sadly lost my free J2 account when I exceeded receiving more than 20 pages of faxes in one month.  Take it from me, they are serious about the limit.