Cloud Printing with Print By Email

15 June, 2010 - 07:00 AM - 10 Comments

HP or Hewlett-Packard announced last week its ePrint platform which will allow users to send an email to their printer which will print out documents, web pages or other material just by receiving email. This ushers in “Cloud Printing” and HP announced a line of printers that will support the ePrint platform. Imagine now not having to setup a network printer, know its IP address in every single LAN PC or having to share it across a network. Using this technology you can store your document in the cloud (Google Docs for example) and print on demand just by sending an email with that doc to your printer.

The ability to send an email to a Printer would be fantastic in my own home environment because this may make drivers antiquated, you email your printer the document and information and provided the printer itself has the software to interpret and print the document you don’t need to install PC drivers to support the printer. Obviously to support ePrint your printer will need to have internet connection via Ethernet or Wireless.

One thing I am curious about is that most email addresses eventually get found and bombarded by SPAM. So unless your printer is on a corporate Intranet where the emails are not accessible via the Internet, how would you deal with SPAM email being sent to your printer? Would it start printing out SPAM emails?

I would imagine the printer would allow you to configure “Authorized domain names” where only emails from certain “domain names” will be accepted by the printer, any others will be ignored or rejected. This way I could only print to my printer from a dragonblogger.com email but if someone at any other email address tried to send a print job from their email, it would be rejected.

What are your thoughts about ePrint and Cloud Printing? Will this make it easier to setup printers in small businesses, homes with multiple computers or even large corporations?

-Dragon Blogger

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Written by Justin Germino (1518 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

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writerightforyou 5 pts

This post is old, but just wanted to say that I've been reading the specs on these and they do give you an option to accept print from only a certain email address, block out others, or accept all, etc.

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Dragon Blogger 134 pts moderator

writerightforyou Yes, now that it has come out I have read about the more secure features. I recently did some cloud printing but not to my own printer that does cloud printing and was impressed by the convenience.

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Colin@Wireless Printer

I love new technology and really hope this comes up trumps. It would be cool if you could have like a family cloud of printers that you could send holiday pics to people back home.

Jannich @ Hvor meget skal jeg veje?

Being able to configure which domains are allowed to send printjobs via email is not a sufficient solution, since spoofing the sender of an email is the easiest thing in the world(tm).

I am looking forward to HP's solution to this problem. :-)

dragonblogger

I am curious as well to find out how it will work and prevent spammers from sending print jobs.

Ileane @ Ms. Ileane Speaks

Hey Justin, this is pretty neat. I started moving files into the cloud recently using DropBox and Evernote and this would be an added bonus. Do you know if these printers are for sale yet?
Thanks for the tip!

Luqman @ Domain name registration

I think HP will have taken the issue of spam mail into consideration and the ePrint will have lots of function to configure your printer.

Lauren

Don't get me wrong, I love HP. I love the printers and the computers, I have three HP computers and 2 HP printers. Yes, I'm obsessed, but that besides the point. This seems like a great idea, to a point. I would be worried about my email security, however I would like to be able to print docs much easier.

ShirleyKelly@Lanterns-4-less

I was sold until you mentioned whether or not the printer would print spam emails. If there is a way to program approved domains I say Hooray for HP. I love innovation and this could very well be the way of all future printers.