I gave my printer an email address and my family finally stopped asking me to print things
Printing from a phone is somehow still the worst UX in the house. I built a little phone-upload web portal for the family a while back — nobody used it. Not once. Asking people to bookmark an internal URL and pick files through a browser was apparently too much, and honestly, fair.
Then it hit me that every person in my house already knows how to do exactly one technical thing reliably: forward an email. So the printer got an email address.
The chain: print@ my domain goes through Cloudflare Email Routing into a mailbox, a filter files it into its own folder, and a small container on one of my boxes polls that folder over IMAP. PDF or image attached — prints it. Word doc — headless LibreOffice converts to PDF first, then prints. No attachment at all — it renders the email body itself to PDF and prints that, so forwarding a school notice just works. Everything goes to CUPS driverless to an HP laser, the processed message gets moved to a Printed folder so nothing prints twice on restart, and the sender gets a reply confirming it printed.
The part I'd tell you not to skip: a sender allow-list that fails closed. An open email-to-print gateway means spam becomes paper. Ask me how I thought of that before it happened, because it was close.
Warts, since nothing's free: there's no content dedup, so my wife double-sending a permission slip prints two permission slips. And the whole thing hangs off one mailbox filter that predates the project, which is the kind of dependency that will absolutely bite me in a year when I've forgotten it exists.
It's been running since June. Wife forwards PDFs from her phone in the school pickup line. Nobody has asked me to print anything in a month, which as far as I'm concerned is the entire point of self-hosting.
