Program one address into the copier and every scan lands in Pipeline instead of an inbox. Choosing whose address is the only real decision.
Introduction
Scanning straight into Pipeline is the single biggest time saver an office gets out of maildrop, and setting it up takes about five minutes. The reason it takes people longer is that they start by looking for a company-wide scanning address — and there isn't one.
Every maildrop address belongs to one user. That's deliberate: Pipeline reads the address a document was sent to and records that person as the one who added it, which is what makes the trail hold up months later. A shared address would cost you that.
Which leaves you a genuine choice. Point the copier at a real person's address and keep an accurate record of who scanned what. Or create a user that exists only to receive scans, and accept that everything shows as added by that user. Both are common. The second one is what most multi-copier offices land on, for reasons that have nothing to do with the scanner and everything to do with staff turnover.
When to Use This
- You want the office copier to send scans straight into Pipeline instead of to somebody's email.
- You've been hunting for a single company-wide scanning address.
- A staff member left and their maildrop address is programmed into every copier in the building.
- You're setting up a new office and want the scan-to-Pipeline path in from day one.
- Scans are being sent and nothing is arriving.
1. Pick Whose Maildrop the Scanner Will Use
Two workable answers, and the trade-off is the same one either way.
A real person's address — usually the admin who processes paperwork. Everything scanned is credited to them, which is accurate when they're the one at the copier and misleading when they aren't. And when they leave, every copier they were programmed into needs reprogramming.
A dedicated user — a profile named Front Desk or Office Scanner that exists to own the address. Every scan then shows as added by that user, so you lose the who. What you gain is that the address survives every staff change forever, which is the thing that actually bites offices with four copiers and a front desk that turns over.
You can't reassign one user's maildrop address to another user, so this choice is worth making deliberately rather than discovering later. If the person who owns the scanner address ever leaves, deactivating them stops the address accepting mail — and scans start vanishing silently.
2. Collect the Addresses
Each user's Unassigned maildrop address is shown to them at the top of the Unassigned page, which is fine for one person and slow for twelve. To get all of them at once, download the User List from Manage Users — the Maildrop column carries every address in the account.
The Manage Users page lists everyone on your account — the active roster by default, with each person's record a click away.
See Users List
3. Create the Scanner User if You Chose That Route
A dedicated scanner profile is an ordinary user. Give it a name your team will recognise on a doc list, and make sure it has permission to upload docs — without that, mail sent to its address is refused.
Add the agents and staff on your team so each person can log in and work in Pipeline under their own account.
See Adding a User
4. Program the Address Into the Copier
Put the address into the copier's address book the way you'd add any email contact, and scan a test page. The steps differ by machine, so this is the moment for your IT person or the copier's manual — from Pipeline's side there's nothing to configure at all.
Email your documents to a maildrop address and Pipeline pulls the attachments in — no logging in, no uploading.
See Maildrop
Maildrop addresses end in @docs.paperlesspipeline.com. Typing @paperlesspipeline.com into a copier is the single most common setup mistake, and mail sent there never arrives and never bounces back to the machine.
5. Turn On Acknowledgements to Diagnose Missing Scans
A copier that fails silently is a nightmare to troubleshoot, which is why this step isn't optional in practice. With acknowledgements on, every scan sent to that address gets a reply saying what uploaded, what didn't, and why.
Email docs into Pipeline and get a receipt back telling you what uploaded, what didn't, and why.
Ask Pipeline to write back every time you email docs in, and you'll know what uploaded and what didn't without going to look.
The receipt goes to the user who owns the maildrop address, not to whoever pressed scan. If you set up a Front Desk user, turn the setting on while logged in as Front Desk and point that profile's email at a real inbox somebody reads.