...
For the analog grandfather who wishes he could see the digital
> vacation photos that everyone else in the family emails to one
> another, or the beloved aunt who just can't or won't get an email
> address, one company thinks it has a solution: turn emails and digital
> photos into paper documents, automatically, without a computer.
> Presto!
> This week, we tested a new service called Presto that works with a
> special Hewlett-Packard printer called the Printing Mailbox. After
> setup, the user is assigned a Presto.com email address to which
> friends and family send text emails or photos. But the owner of this
> gadget doesn't need a computer, and never has to go online to retrieve
> emails. The Printing Mailbox automatically and periodically dials into
> the Internet using a regular phone line, retrieves all messages sent
> to it -- including photos -- and prints them out.
Won't spam kill this thing immediately?
My legitimate e-mail is outnumbered by spam 10 to 1. And much of it is obnoxious.
Maybe we finally have a corporation with a vested interest in stopping spammers.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I was thinking the same thing; and the folks who use this little printer (instead of a computer) will have to pay for the paper and the ink it uses. Like yourself, spam here outnumbers legitimate email, but for me, about 15-20 to 1. My mother has a device like that; it is called 'Mail Station' but instead of printing out the mail FIRST, it displays it on a small screen, and allows you to print it as desired. For the most part, it is immune to the viri which infects 'regular computers'. The 'mail station' is a very simple display terminal, but, does it ever get spammed. Over Christmas, my mother complained that the 'mail station' seemed to be quite sluggish in receiving her email, and then when it did come out it was a couple hundred pages of someone's core dump. She said she guessed she would 'just give up on it'; when I told her that here at my site, spams in the form of HMTL pages and other gibberish were the norm rather than the exception. Even on Christmas Day itself, Spam Assassin here caught several hundred items, another 300-400 items managed to get through the filters. The BBC writer earlier in this issue is correct; spam is well into the ninetieth percentile range. I certainly would not want one of those printers around here, mainly because who can afford to keep the paper stocked for it. PAT]