Digital Fax

The digital fax allows people to send and receive faxes through their EPFL mailbox. Those faxes, sent like e-mails, will then be retrieved by a fax server at the EPFL and transformed to a classical fax. The latter will be sent to the recipient as a fax.

  1. Create un new email.
  2. Type the fax number in international format (+4121…) + in the adress bar of your message.

    Example: [email protected]

  3. Add a subject as for an email (optional).
  4. Add a body to the message (optional).
  5. Add the document in PDF format (max.15 pages).
  6. Send the email.

You will receive a few minutes after sending the message a transmission report in your email inbox.

Your fax document contains a first page within your firstname and lastname, the fax number (this one of your unity), the subject and the body of the message then your PDF document.

If you got a failure report after following the steps below while faxing, please contact the ServiceDesk (1234) and open an incident.


When it is configured, you will receive incoming faxes in the mailboxes provided for this purpose.

Note: If you use SMTP protocol for sending emails, it must be configured in secured mode with authentification (SMTPS port 465). See Connexions authentifiées au serveur


In terms of security, the digital fax is as safe as the old analog one.

Indeed, even if it is sent as an email, the latter never leaves EPFL’s internal network. It is firstly retrieved by an internal fax server which will transformed it to a real fax and then sent to the recipient.

The fax leaving EPFL’s internal network is not an email but a real fax. The email is kept on our network.

If transmitting sensitive documents, you can reduce the risks associated with the email used to send your fax by following the instructions below:

  1. Delete the email from the “sent” folder.
  2. Delete the “Delivery Report” received when the fax was delivered.
  3. Delete both of them definitively from the trash folder.

Once done, there is no way to recover your document in your emails and the only copy is in the fax recipient. The risks are thus reduced to the maximum.