Finally built it - email PDFs, Word documents, etc. to Remarkable!
Hey everyone. I'm a lawyer and I use Remarkable all the time to review documents for work, sign letters, take notes, etc. I came across this thread a couple of weeks ago because I was in court for trial, the judge ordered both sides to work something out, and the other side emailed me a draft of the document to review and to let him know if I have any changes. I thought--great job for my Remarkable but no such luck, and I ended up just reading and annotating it on my iPad instead (I bring a lot of gadgets to court).
In any event, it got me thinking since I code and make websites as a hobby that it would have been cool if there were a way that I could have just forwarded the email to my Remarkable but, as you know, it doesn't exist. I see that some people have tried to create something in the past, but nothing that looked secure or could also handle MS Word documents which I use a lot because I review a lot of draft documents, mark them up with changes, etc.
So I spent the last couple of weeks after work putting something together and would love if you would check it out and give me your comments and tell me what you think. Simply put, you create a custom email address that you can forward files to--PDFs, Word docs, Excel, PowerPoint, and, of course, ePub (although I'm not sure anyone actually uses ePub)--and it puts the files right on your Remarkable. I spent a lot of time giving it bells and whistles like auto converting MS Office files to PDF, choosing the folder the docs arrive in as opposed to just crowding the "my files" section, ensuring only "approved" senders can e-mail to avoid spam, and because of my background, making sure that everything is encrypted and private so that it's safe to use for real workflows, no one can read it in transit, copies are wiped the moment it is delivered to the Remarkable, etc. Also, through a lot of tweaking (and server upgrades) I was able to iron out the kinks and got it to the point where if the Remarkable is turned on and connected to wifi, that the file arrives as quickly as 15 seconds after the email sends which, personally, I thought was awesome since I'm super impatient. I also toyed with having it auto-OCR PDFs en route, but it was very server intensive and expensive so maybe in the next version.
Anyway, it's called sendtoremarkable.com (and I guess a clever name, or at least I thought it was clever, "by NeuralSoft Systems") and if you could give me some feedback that would be awesome! Although I very ambitiously put a "paid tier" to try to recoup some of the monthly server costs which are surprisingly expensive, feel free to sign up for the free one. I enabled it so that everyone automatically gets the "Professional" tier for the first 15 days which, given the server cost, is the tier with Microsoft Office capability and all the bells and whistles, but after that you can auto-revert to the free tier if you'd like. No credit card required, no strings attached, just a cool tool that if I can eventually get a few people to sign up and pay to cover the server costs I can keep it up and running.
Last thing, it goes without saying that I don't work for Remarkable, I'm not affiliated with Remarkable, my website isn't endorsed by Remarkable, etc. I'm just a techy-guy who knows how to code and thought I'd problem solve and see if I can make the Remarkable which I otherwise love even more useful. Thanks!