Theoretical script for Kindle Touch free e-mail
- 15
- Jul
This article is about the potential for the Amazon + Facebook loop-hole. It is for curious techies, not people looking for free e-mail. It’s definitely not convenient, but free e-mail anywhere in the world beats the hell out of roaming charges or buying SIM cards in every country.
How it used to be
In older versions of the Kindle, the ones with keyboards, having 3G meant free internet access anywhere in the world where there was local cell coverage. It was a little slow and buggy, but it got the job done. You could send updates and e-mails to your loved ones while travelling without having your life revolve around hotel computer kiosks and internet cafes.
Touch and Paperlight Kindles
Unfortunately with the latest generation of Kindle they’ve removed the internet browsing over 3G; fortunately, they added features that make it possible to build a small server app to send e-mails from anywhere in the world.
New & Free 3G Features
- You can Facebook share sections of your readings along with a short comment.
- Kindle downloads the titles of documents that were e-mailed to your kindle address.
Solution
Sending emails
- You use the Kindle’s share on Facebook feature to send your ’email recipient & content’ to a private Facebook account with no friends.
- Write a server side Facebook app that frequently checks this Facebook account for shares, grabs the content and sends it in an email to the intended recipient.
- After the app sends the e-mail it can delete the post for the sake of privacy.
Receiving Emails
- Write a script to parse your incoming email account and break up the content into multiple strings.
- For each of these strings create an empty document with the string as the title, then email it to your kindle email address.
- Over 3G your Kindle won’t be able to download the files, but it will download all of the file’s titles.
Sending and Receiving are independent of each other, if anyone is seriously looking to try and implement it, I would recommend writing the receiving emails section first. I see greater value in it, and working with Facebook can be a pain.
