Email current page as attachment?

October 19, 2013 12:55 PM

I need a bookmarklet, preferably, that will send an email with the current page as an attachment -- not just the link, the actual file. Bonus if you can pre-specify the email address (or otherwise make it 1-click).

I will settle for an IFTTT recipe that makes this happen (maybe through automatically saving a page to a dropbox folder?), or *possibly* a browser extension, though I hate the idea of giving out yet more permissions to unknown developers. Greasemonkey would be ok.

It must physically send the current page as an attachment, not just a link, and it must be the file that is on my computer (not one re-requested by another server).

posted by tintexas to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I haven't checked the most recent versions, but I believe Internet Explorer had an option on the File menu that was Send -> Page by E-mail. This talks a little about it.
posted by jeffamaphone at 1:16 PM on October 19, 2013

You could try email the web. This doesn't "physically" happen though, not sure how you could do that
posted by Brent Parker at 1:21 PM on October 19, 2013

Another issue is web pages are often a collection of files. An HTML file, images, style sheets, maybe some javascript files, even videos, flash, etc. Do you want to send just the HTML as-is? Or do you want to include everything (to avoid linkrot, etc.)? I use OS X's support for the webarchive standard combined with DevonTHINK to store full pages locally. Would you be willing to email a webarchive? The Internet Archive has their own archive format as well.

If you can get by with just the HTML, it would be easier. I think an Alfred script could be put together to first select all and then copy the selected content and then paste it into an email to a particular person.

Brent Parker is right, physically is not the word you're looking for unless you're talking about USPS sorts of mail, which may be a reason google'ing for solutions isn't coming up with the right results.
posted by Brian Puccio at 1:53 PM on October 19, 2013

Response by poster: The specific application of this process is to send restricted-access pdf's (that won't resolve from a url) to my kindle. With respect to the first answers, they just don't quite work:

1) No one uses IE, so opening the file in IE won't save me time. I'm impressed though.
2) Email The Web wants access to my gmail account. Ew.
3) Alfred is for Macs; a javascript bookmarklet or Chrome extension would be cross-platform and usable.

I am quite satisfied with my usage of "physically," btw.
posted by tintexas at 2:57 PM on October 19, 2013

You could use an autohotkey script to auto save the file to your system and then email it.
posted by srboisvert at 4:56 PM on October 19, 2013

So these are not web pages as such, they're PDFs? So you're trying to do is send the currently viewed PDF to your special kindle intake address, is that right?
posted by artlung at 11:45 AM on October 20, 2013

Response by poster: That's correct. Right now the process is: I have to save them, open up a new email, type in the right address, find the file, drag and drop, send. I would use this much more often if it was just a button on my browser.
posted by tintexas at 1:16 PM on October 20, 2013

I suspect this is not as easy as it could be because typically PDF files get handed off to a "PDF Viewer." When I'm in this scenario usually what I do is open up (I mostly use Chrome) Chrome Developer Tools and look at the network history and look for items with a content type of application/pdf and pull the url directly and then drop those into a command line and then do curl -O {url}. This is not optimal, but it's how I've solved the problem.

There are download tools that detect things like flv and mp4 file links. I wonder if there's a similar tool to allow detection and downloading of PDFs? Here's a Firefox tool called PDF Download. The reviews for that are not very good - but perhaps is a clue for what kind of description you'll be searching for.

Sorry couldn't help more than that.
posted by artlung at 8:14 AM on October 21, 2013

tintexas, I can't add to this other than to say I would love to find out how to do this as well. I'd always thought being able to email entire web pages -- even just the html, or just the text -- to my own (easily searchable and taggable) gmail account would be the greatest bookmarking service ever.
posted by Alaska Jack at 11:51 PM on October 21, 2013