HP Gives Printers Email Addresses

Barence writes "HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allowing people to print from devices such as smartphones and tablets. The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own — or someone else's — printer. It will also let people more easily share physical documents; rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer. 'HP plans to offer a few of these new printers to consumers this month, and then a few more of the products to small businesses in September.'"

This

[CSFFlame]

could never ever be abused in any way.

Please.

[JesseL]

Tell me these will use at least a whitelist to determine which emails get printed. I don't need a stack of full color Viagr@ spam in my printer tray.

Too late?

[TrippTDF]

This could have been amazing ten years ago... but printers as a technology on the whole seem to be dying out to me. I knew fewer people that have them, as there is very little that needs to be printed anymore.

Faxing

[SlamMan]

And so now we're back to fax spam? Thanks HP!

Re:Please.

[AnonymousClown]

...or at least a queue that can be examined and the option to delete things before anything is printed.

email addresses for printers a dumb idea anyway. I very rarely print (legal documents that require a signature) and when I do, it's on something that costs a lot less than a HP printer - Brother or Kodak.

Re:Please.

[CannonballHead]

Because e-mail "from" can't be spoofed ... hm.

fantastic!

[Thud457]

great, another 50MB of bloat on top of the 95MB they currently cram down your throat and insist on updating daily. With their own proprietary update scheduler. For something that requires maybe 20K of actual code, if any.

Re:This

[Locke2005]

The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own -- or someone else's -- printer.

Let the printer spamming begin!

Not new, and furthermore, why?

[LoudMusic]

For starters this isn't exactly new. It might be new to consumer grade crapware printers, but I believe I setup a Canon office copier that had the ability to receive emails and print them approximately 8 years ago.

Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.

Re:Please.

[dsavi]

Whitelist? Oh no. They're gonna get rich from all the ink this uses!

Re:fantastic!

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Uh, I'm pretty sure this is a printer-side thing. And if it weren't, then that's even dumber than either of us ever conceived.

Re:This

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At least all the veterans of the fax machine spam campaigns will feel relevant again...

Re:Why is this news?

[Venerable Vegetable]

I was thinking the same. Each printer (including the small desktop models) at my work can be emailed to and from, which works excellent with printing, scanning and faxing (receiving and sending). I've seen the same printers for sale at normal consumer shops...

If I understand correctly though, it will have a preconfigured, easy to set up web-based email adress om a HP server. Basically bringing the normal enterprise functionality to home users.

That would be fairly neat, but also rather useless and easy to abuse.

Re:This

[idontgno]

Multimedia spam convergence.

DO NOT WANT!

Re:not cool

[$RANDOMLUSER]

now you can kill trees everywhere with a button press on your phone

Now you'll be able to show your grandkids pictures of trees.

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[tepples]

What in the hell were they thinking? EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.

Then what store-and-forward file transfer protocol should ISPs make available to their users to replace e-mail attachments?

Black email

[bluefoxlucid]

So back to black faxing....

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

Whitelists work because spammers often don't know which "from" address to spoof.

And??

[mweather]

I have a 10 year old Xerox printer that has an email address. This isn't new by a long shot.

Re:Faxing

[eugene ts wong]

Note: the coupon will be white lettering on a black background and will probably take an entire 8x11 sheet of paper...

That's what I call masterful humour. I would have never thought of that in a million years, but going along that train of thought, I would make the printer try to print a 8.5" x 11.5" document on a 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, thus, forcing out 2 pieces of paper due to a "bug". Of course, the second page should contain the exact same blank black background.

Speaking of abuse....

[syousef]

Dear HP Printer,

PC Load Letter???? What the @#$!# does that mean?!?!?

Sincerely,

Frustrated User.

Re:Please.

[LoverOfJoy]

One of the other addresses in the address book of your mom's (or boss's or client's) infected computer? Or maybe your mom's (or boss's or client's) own address.

You're right that they likely don't have your whitelist addresses if they just found your email publicly posted on a website like slashdot. If they somehow got your address from another person's infected computer the odds are a bit higher that they can find a whitelisted address.

Re:Please.

[EdIII]

LOL. Yeah, You missed EVERYTHING on this one.

Understandable though. You approached it like an IT person. Now go to the wall, bang your head against it furiously 10 times in a row and consider the USER. Banging your head just helps you think like one.

The user will not care about white listing or security, or any other reasonable consideration we can come up with in 60 seconds on /. about this ridiculously, deliciously, stupid idea.

This was a marketing exec over at HP that thought of a cool feature and rammed it down the developers throats.

Users are lazy. Instead of opening up the email, opening up the attachment, and clicking print they can now give that email address to people OUTSIDE OF THE COMPANY. Bob from ABC Whatmacallits needs to send an invoice. Great, just send it this email address that will print out in accounting. Less work for the user, same work for Bob.

People will share this email address as an easy way to get things printed without having to do as much work as before. Simple as that.

You try whitelisting the email addresses or IP addresses for that and generate a hundred support calls.

What I find more interesting, and you should too, is that the email address may be hosted by HP. A whole other can of worms to be sure.

Re:Please.

[dotgain]

If by 'Real nerds' you mean 'wankers who like to deliberately use less-common (sometimes obsolete) and more confusing terms just to gain some sense of self-importance by explaining themselves and (un)correcting people all the time', then yes.

But I would wager that most 'Real nerds', when installing such a package on their system (you probably use the term "Winchester Disk" here), would refer to a package by the name they look it up with. Otherwise, keeping track of all the forking and renaming would be rather hard on one's memory. Oh, sorry, I mean to say "core", like your Real Nerd (TM) would.

Re:This

[PPH]

I can just imagine the first wave pf spam: 8.5x11 color photo quality coupons for printer ink refills.

Re:This

[geirlk]

Would you believe HP haven't considered this already?

To me it looks like a ploy to sell even more overpriced printer ink/toner

Re:This

[skine]

This just reminds me of my mother's Gateway laptop that started having popup ads for Gateway after two years.

There's no reason HP couldn't do something similar with their printers.