Help Desk

Open the portal and confirm the account name is “reedcollege,” then click the “Login” button. Sign in with your Reed credentials and authenticate as needed.

When you sign in you will see your inbox.

Your inbound and outbound fax history can be accessed using the menu on the left. Outgoing faxes that are still processing will appear in the outgoing queue until sending either succeeds or fails.

Click the “+ New Fax” button to begin a new outbound fax.

1. Click on the New Fax button on the left
2. Add the destination fax number
3. Optionally add the subject and content of the cover sheet
4. Drag or browse for any documents you wish to attach
5. Click Submit at the top of the screen

Outbound faxes enter a queue and may take several minutes to send. Completed and failed faxes move from the Outbound queue to Outbound history.

If you have a Reed-managed fax number, just give out your fax number and wait to receive the fax. You'll be notified via email that a fax has arrived and you must log into the fax web portal to view it.

New faxes will appear in your Inbound history folder. You may receive email notifications of new faxes when new faxes arrive depending on your personal or department notification settings. You may view, forward, and delete received faxes from this inbox similar to working with emails.

Students who need to receive faxes should list the Reed main fax line (503-777-7769) and contact Printing Services to let them know you're expecting a fax.

If you are monitoring an inbox for your department, see the Fax Boxes section.

Departments may be set up to receive all faxes for their department number in a single account that is managed by multiple people. Delegated members will have privileges on that fax box to share ownership of a single inbox for your department.

Take note of which inbox you are viewing using the drop-down menu when working with fax boxes. When you have the shared fax box selected you are sending and receiving faxes as that account.

Please contact telecomrequest@reed.edu if you have questions about faxing or need access to the XM Fax system.

E-faxing is no less safe than faxing by an analog machine. Neither should be considered a 100% secure document transmission method. Specific fax transmissions can be difficult to capture by a third party as they are spontaneously sent and travel through unspecific routes, but they are not immune to interception and usually lack modern security measures like transport encryption.

Additionally, any fax sent or received by a traditional fax machine can be intercepted at its destination, so you lack authentication of the recipient.

Bearing all that in mind, faxes are still frequently used in industries where secure alternatives are too complex, not universally adopted by all parties, lacking in language support, or unable to meet compliance standards.

OpenText's infrastructure is certified or compliant with several industry standards, notably PCI DSS and HIPAA, and the portal itself is behind Reed's identity provider. The fax system is only responsible for transporting the document. Securely creating, handling, and deleting documents in accordance with Reed's Data Classification and Handling Guidelines in order to stay compliant is up to you.

If you would like to sidestep faxing altogether and send an encrypted file instead, see CUS' guide on sending encrypted files via filerobot.

First you'll need to digitize it. Departments that do this frequently have offline, USB document scanners to digitize the original documents and send them without using scan-to-email or other networked scanning options. Contact CUS to request a scanner for regular use or Printing Services to send for you.

Send the digitized document using the sending faxes process above, then delete the document from your computer after you've sent it. As long as your computer's disk is encrypted and you are deleting the file after sending then you'll still be handling restricted data in accordance with Reed's Data Classification and Handling Guidelines.

This fax system is configured to keep faxes and emails separated. If it’s too sensitive to be emailed then faxing with an email-integrated fax system would defeat the purpose of sending a fax. This means that if you have a physical document that's too sensitive to email and must be faxed, you should avoid digitizing it via scan-to-email.

The system supports many common document formats and extensions. You can attach PDFs, Word documents, and image files. The cloud fax service needs to rasterize and process whatever you send before it sends the fax to its final destination.

Contact telecomrequest@reed.edu if you encounter issues with attachment file types.

Absolutely. As long as you are staff or faculty at Reed with a valid Reed email address, you may request an account by emailing telecomrequest@reed.edu. You do not need a fax number attached to your account in order to send outbound faxes, but you won't be able to receive a reply without one.

Students can contact Printing Services for assistance with faxing.

There are three "receiving" solutions: 

1. A fax line can be tied to one user account, e.g., Jane receives all faxes for 503-XXX-XXXX
2. An fax line can be shared among multiple accounts, e.g. Jane and John and Jose and Martha all receive faxes sent to 503-XXX-XXXX in each person's fax account. They each receive their own copy and won't know if the others have read or processed their copies.
   
3. An fax line can be tied to a delegated account, e.g.  ImportantOffice@reed.edu is a shared email address that all users in the Important Office department are able to view, and faxes for 503-XXX-XXX are only sent to this account, not to each person's email account. See the Fax Boxes section above for more information.

If you only need to receive the occasional fax, Printing Services can send, receive, and distribute faxes for you.

If you have regular fax receiving needs, contact telecomrequest@reed.edu to request a new fax number and account.

These are the most common reasons your fax has failed:

• Has the number been typed correctly in the address field?
• Does the destination fax work? Not surprisingly, many other offices have abandoned their fax machine. Several times an outbound e-fax has "failed" only for us to call the destination and learn their fax machine is out of service.
• Even under normal network conditions, your fax may fail to send. Faxing is a best effort communication method and will automatically retry after a few minutes.