Mail my printer - I'm busy! Take a picture on your phone, email it to your printer and Hey Presto!, it's waiting for you when go home. This is what HP has in mind with its launch today a bunch of printers that all come with their very own email addresses. The company has already spilled the guts of the announcement to The NY Times' Ashlee Vance (once of …
Would there be some sort of whitelist attached to this?
Otherwise what's to stop some nasty spammers getting hold of my printer's email address, so I come home to find a rainforest's worth of viagra adverts waiting for me?
I wouldn't be happy if my elderly Auntie Flora was playing a nice game of Solitaire on my PC and a graphic penis enlargement ad suddenly appeared. She might be, mind you.
...for a company that makes money off of ink cartridges.
But aren't most of us moving in the "paperless" direction?
Some flaws in the thinking here:
1. Impulsivity: "This is an awesome picture. I can't wait to see it big. I'll just email it to my printer..." LATER: "Why on earth did I think I needed a paper copy of THIS?"
2. "I just knew you were going to want to see the latest picture of little Billy with a bowl of spaghetti on his head. It is even funnier than the one from last week! So I sent it to your printer..."
3. And, God forbid, the moment someone-you-know gets malware that sends itself to every address in their email contacts. Including the one they saved for your printer.
So this is fax-over-IP then. Or just auto-printing of emails. And like the other comments, please have security enabled out of the box. There are junk faxes but not too many cos they cost money to send, but email is free hence the spam.
And oh what fun to send emails to these ending with "please consider the planet before printing this email".
Hmm, could this be the solution to printing from ChromeOS (especially as Google appear to be involved to enable apps and docs tie-ins)? Maybe it's just a happy coincidence.
Either way I also worry about the direct-spam, effect. It was bad enough with fax machine spewing out pages of crap at work back in the day, I don't want my home printer doing the same!
the fax machine! Boy I wish there was a modern alternative so that I could receive spam in full colour. Christ, all it needs now is a way to receive teletext and a Morse telegraph terminal on the side and it'll just be 2 carrier pigeons short of the perfect communications device.
oh lordy.
I'm pretty sure various network printer drivers have been supporting this sort of thing for yonks, though perhaps this is the first time it's been built into the printer itself. Nonetheless, I am unmoved. Unless there is a button which tells the printer to go to my shelf and load a single sheet of photo paper first.
I do. They make very nice printer hardware, but the associated software is unmitigated crap. Some of it doesn't even know how to do a reverse DNS lookup correctly. Fully-qualified name has 4 parts, with three dots between them? Ah, must be a numeric IP address, never mind that it is entirely alphabetic. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to see these printers virus-laden and *sending* SPAM mail, never mind *printing* it :(
This is a shit idea, out-shitted only by my 'email by post' idea (I've already submitted the patent, so hands off!)
It's also a solution in search of a problem. I've never had the need for anything to be printed by the time I get home. I can usually take the 5 seconds hit.
(Sorry, I've had a bad day)
The fax is alive and thriving! Of course it is doing it alongside IE6 in thousands of gubbermint offices. Hell, I've had the official types asking me to fax them a copy of a service manual... fully knowing that it was 90+ pages long. Why? This particular government office prohibits email attachments and those that are sent get stripped out by the server. He was, fortunately, able to receive an overnighted CD.
In this age, I really tote a smartphone all the time. I can take pictures with it. I can also use it for many other things, like accessing web sites and documents anywhere, as well as reading e-books.
That's why I threw out my printer three years ago and won't be replacing it.
I'm fairly certain that I've been able to print to any of the printers on my network, from any machine on my network, for over 25 years.
I'm equally certain that I don't allow anyone NOT on my network to send print jobs to any of my printers ... They can make it available via FTP on their system, and *IF* I deem it worthwhile (rare), I'll download it, examine it ... and then (maybe) print it. And please, Please, *PLEASE!* don't attach it to email!
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