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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.'"
A spammers mouth just started salivating uncontrollably.
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We thought it was in 1998 when we did it with our InnMail system http://www.thefreelibrary.com/AlphaNet+Hospitality+Systems+and+Loews+Hotels+Expand+Long+Standing...-a020787415 We had a fax server service that converted e-mail's to faxes. Anyone subscribing to our system received a dedicated e-mail address and a dedicated fax number. This could be forwarded to any fax machine where ever you were. We finally discontinued the service last year.
While obviously Microsoft popularized it in the specific "designed for Windows" form in, as I recall, the Win95/NT4-era, I think that the concept of offloading functions from peripherals to software running on the workstation the peripheral was serving as a measure which both saves costs and ties the peripheral to a specific operating system predates its use by Microsoft -- NeXT, for instance, did the same thing with its Canon-manufactured laser printers, as I recall.
This is an obvious opportunity to have an open source alternative. A simple program to recieve email from any address the user wants and let them add a custom subject field "password" that allows them to print remotely.
The idea isn't that great but if there's an HP driver version compared to even the most basic OSS version with the actual options to avoid spam delivery then it's a good thing for us. Not saying that people will print more or that they need to print from a device that they carry with them anyway, but if HP thinks there's a market a quick programmer could show them up very easily.
And the subject field / sender whitelist combo would be a good alternative to the so far unknown "features" that they fail to mention in the real article. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07printer.html?ref=technology
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) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
We know how widely the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) on port 631 is used; just because it implements access control, authentication, and encryption, avoiding the inevitable spam problem makes it much better for this purpose than any kludge using email protocols. If we could only teach the crew at geek squad to set it up and teach the clueless users how to use it, we'd be much better off.
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I did exactly this back in 1991 to deal with printing from a computer behind a two-way firewall with extremely restrictive permissions. The easiest protocol which was permitted through the firewall was email, and it automatically meant queueing was handled properly.
Recall what the printer manufacturers did when everyone started taking digital pictures. They put memory slots in the printer and software that would one-touch print the various picture formats. This was nothing that technical people would use, we all had computer with photo editing suites and high end printers, but for the mom wanting to print pictures of the kids is was a great way to sell ink.
This is all that is happening now. Someone has some snaps on their smart phone or feature phone with email. They want to print it but they don't really want to mess with the computer. They don't have a memory card that will work with the old printer. They don't want to go the marketplace and download the app and set up the printer. So they email. It works. One touch plug and play printing. They use ink that HP sells.
The other context to this is that ten years ago houses were not networked the way they are now, and network kit was not so cheap. Ten years ago a card or box to network a printer wold be north of $200, and a networked printer would be north of $1000. Now HP sells a network ready printer for $100 and most houses have a ethernet port to plug it into.
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Your post has given me an excellent idea. We create a line of printers containing a small bomb, set to explode after a predetermined time. We advertise this as a feature, but use lots of buzzwords. A short while later, we eliminate the market of people who buy stupid things because they contain buzzwords. Companies will then have to market their products to the survivors by providing actual features.
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So they can find *a* whitelisted address... maybe. And once they have my mom's email address, I can take her off the whitelist. I can call her and say "Yo mom, fix your shit."
But generally the problem with whitelists is not that spammers are clever enough to spoof whitelisted addresses. The real problem with whitelists is that we all get a lot of email from random unexpected sources, so we usually can't only allow whitelisted email in. A whitelist on a printer like this would probably work fairly well, since you don't want it to receive print jobs from unexpected sources.