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.'"

Comments

This

[CSFFlame]

could never ever be abused in any way.

Re:This

[CarpetShark]

Nope. It's not like printers have been hacked with less to work from.

Re:This

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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

Re:This

[evilbessie]

But think of the new paradigm of email/fax spam, a synergy of such epic proportions as to usher in a new Zeitgeist.

Sorry.

Re:This

[Romancer]

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

Re:This

[Voyager529]

I find your ideas fascinating and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

...so post your printer's e-mail address!

Re:This

[hpa]

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.

Re:This

[dotgain]

"Smarts" in the printer?!?! No, sir - this featurette will be part of the wonderful HP Driver & Utility package, now available on a single disk thanks to BluRay technology. It'll run from your PC. And when I say PC, I mean the one you basically 'give' to the HP drivers.

Re:This

[PPH]

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

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.

Re:Please.

[conares]

Hell no! Goatse for everybody!

Re:Please.

[CannonballHead]

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

Re:Please.

[dsavi]

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

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

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

Re:Please.

[Beardo the Bearded]

WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner

Re:Please.

[budgenator]

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.

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:Please.

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

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.

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.

Re:Too late?

[Steve Newall]

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.

Re:Too late?

[fermion]

There is context to what HP is doing. It has to do with smart phones that take pictures but doesn't have built in printing capability. Form what have read, this has lead people to look at pictures but not print them. Sure there are solutions, but they are not really 'plug and play'. If it is hard to print, HP does not sell ink.

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.

Why is this news?

[djsmiley]

At work we have printers and scanners you can email to, from Ricoh.

Not sure what this is getting on slashdot for exactly?

Re:Why is this news?

[BobMcD]

Welcome to slashdot. A few pointers:

1) Not everything here is 'news'.

2) Not everything here is 'for nerds'.

3) Not everything here will make sense to any one given person.

4) Commenting 'why' has approximately zero chance of modifying any of the above.

Enjoy your stay!

Re:Why is this news?

[tomhudson]

At work we have printers and scanners you can email to, from Ricoh.

Email address or it didn't happen!

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.

I really hope this has some form of verification..

[Mysticalfruit]

1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...
2. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se
3. ???
4. Profit?

Faxing

[SlamMan]

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

Re:Faxing

[Mysticalfruit]

Now, you'll get a print out from your printer telling you you're out of ink and at the bottom will be a coupon you can cut out... Note: the coupon will be white lettering on a black background and will probably take an entire 8x11 sheet of paper...

Re:Faxing

[Anonymous Coward]

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

At least there is a good part.

How many days until we get a post on TheDailyWTF regarding a PHB asking their employee to send them an email with a blank word document, because their printer is out of paper?

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:fantastic!

[DragonWriter]

You can blame MS for that. They were after all the ones that popularized the neutered overpriced "designed for Windows" hardware, which was a real piece of hardware with a couple chips removed so that they required Windows only software to work.

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.

somewhere in the world...

[Coraon]

A spammers mouth just started salivating uncontrollably.

Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for this

[RollingThunder]

...and by "congratulations", I mean a nice, hard punch in the crotch.

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

Back to the Future 2

[Jeng]

Now when you are fired your boss can let your kids and wife know by printing out You're Fired from all the printers in the house.

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:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[schon]

who can't already print from their existing email client?

ipad users.

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[BobMcD]

1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...
2. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se
3. Invest in companies that sell ink
4. Profit?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[icebraining]

CUPS supports three different printing protocols over TCP (which means, over the Internet). IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), for example, is ten years old, and it supports access control, authentication, and encryption.

HP: Hard at work for a better tomorrow

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

By ensuring your ink cartridges are changed regularly, we can help make sure your ink will always be fresh. At HP we're making it easier for empty out those old, crusty ink cartridges by printing all your attachments for you. At the same time we're keeping your ink fresh, we're also helping you uphold your document retention policy by automatically generating hard copies of all your email!

Amazed? Well that's just what we do.

Love,
Hewlett-Packard

And??

[mweather]

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

Speaking of abuse....

[syousef]

Dear HP Printer,

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

Sincerely,

Frustrated User.