Letter Never Sent

I love my Kindle. I use it nearly every day. Even though there are many books I can’t get on it, I prefer to read this way now, so I usually just move on to something I can read on the Kindle. Take note book publishers!

I’d like to use it more for other things, but the web browser is limited. One cool feature is that since every Kindle has an Internet connection and an email address you can email yourself documents that will be converted and sent to the Kindle for 10 cents (unsure on why the cost unless it’s to throttle network-crippling usage). Also, your Kindle will only receive messages sent from a sender whitelist, so you should not receive spam. Unfortunately, this means you have to add various friends and colleagues to your Kindle whitelist if you want to receive documents from them on your Kindle. If you have a lot of friends or colleagues this is a pain in the butt and will require ongoing management. There’s an easy way to liberalize access, which should still prevent spam:

1. Allow your email account to send to your Kindle from your settings at Amazon.
2. Create an email filter to forward specific messages to your Kindle. For example, inform your network that if they wish to submit documents directly to your Kindle, attach the document to the email and use “[kindle delivery]” somewhere in the subject line. Then just filter your messages by this subject line and if they have an attachment then have them redirected to your Kindle email address from your whitelisted email account. In Gmail, this would be: subject:([kindle delivery]) has:attachment
3. Each email to your Kindle ([email protected]) costs 10 cents per conversion, so if you anticipate a lot of senders and want to save some money, you can have documents sent to [email protected], which will convert the documents for you but will not deliver to the Kindle. Using this method you can transfer the converted documents over the USB connection.

This could be useful for anyone who runs through a lot of PDF’s or lengthy Word documents from different people. I’m thinking of publishing agents, editorial staff, lawyers, college professors, corporate managers, etc. If you encounter abuse, you simply alter the filter or change the subject line. You could set up multiple filters with some documents converted and delivered and other documents converted but not delivered.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Cool Tools, Software / Internet. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.