Some programs let you email documents directly – here’s now.
Microsoft Office for iPad has an ‘Email as attachment’ as one of its limited options for sharing a document. Here’s some clever ways to make use of that and workaround the Office for iPad limitations.
Some cloud services offer an ‘incoming email’ option so you can email a document or file to a certain email address and the attachments will appear in that cloud service.
How these services work varies a bit. Some give you a unique email address that’s linked to your cloud account Other have a single TO: address and use the FROM address on the incoming message to work out where to send the attachment
It’s worth keeping in mind the privacy concerns. The emails can’t be encrypted and, like anything to do with cloud storage, is vulnerable to both legal and illegal intrusion.
OneNote
Back in March 2014, OneNote.com added an ’email your notes’ feature.
It works by emailing to [email protected] from your Microsoft account address or an alias registered to that account. You need to setup this service first by going here and checking the box next to any address you want to send from.
Any message you send is added to the Quick Notes section. The Email subject is the note heading with the message body, including images in the note.
File attachments are added to the note. JPG images are displayed directly while PDF and Office documents have icons. Click on those icons to open them separately.
Evernote
The popular OneNote rival, Evernote has had a similar feature for many years.
Evernote users get a unique email address linked to their account e.g. [email protected] . This means you can ask other people or automated services to send information direct to your Evernote storage.
You can email in messages and attachments. There are also clever Subject line options to control the destination notebook, add a tag or reminder.
More details on the Evernote site.
Kindle
For a long time it’s been possible to email documents to a Kindle device. Each Kindle user has a unique email address AND you have to specify the email addresses that can send to your Kindle.
These days, documents emailed to the Kindle Personal Documents Service go to both your Kindle/s and the Amazon Cloud Drive.
Conversion to the Kindle AZW format is no longer automatic, you have to put the word ‘convert’ into the subject line.
Transfer to the Kindle is only free if you use Wifi. If your Kindle has ‘Whispernet’ (the 3G mobile connection) there’s a service fee. You can set a charge limit (Personal Document Settings | Whispernet Delivery Options | Edit Whispernet Delivery). In the past you could disable this option by setting the charge limit to zero; now there’s an explicit On/off choice.
All this and more is controlled from your Amazon account online; Manage your Content and Devices | Settings. Long time Kindle users may want to check these options because they’ve changed a lot over the years and there might be something of interest.
See Amazon Kindle Personal Documents Service for more details.
IFTTT
For cloud services that don’t directly support incoming emails there is IFTTT.com (If That Then This). Just one of its many abilities is accepting email attachments and sending them to cloud services.
Check out this IFTTT recipe to save email attachments to Dropbox or Google Drive.
