As mentioned in my previous post on Ubiquitous capture, one of the key new features of OfficeDrop is that you can now email documents to your OfficeDrop account. The email bodies and attachments in any of the supported formats will be processed to your OfficeDrop account, just like the documents you mail in or upload.

In this post, I will describe this feature up-close and personal and discuss the different ways of using it. 

How does this feature work?

Each OfficeDrop account gets its own unique email address, which is <your-username>@pixilymail.com. So for example, if the username you use to login at OfficeDrop is johnorganizer, your pixily email address will be johnorganizer@pixilymail.com. Thats nice and easy to remember, isnt it?

Unlike the more common approach of using magic strings (look45youme@foobar.com) , we made your email address simple to remember. And simple, not just for you, but also for your clients, business partners, friends or anyone else that would like to send you documents via email. So you can go ahead and provide your pixily email address to them and any documents they send will be processed to your OfficeDrop account. Remember, it is pixilymail.com

What happens when I receive an email at my pixilymail account?

• We send an acknowledgment to both the sender and to you, that we have received an email to be processed. The email will then be processed to your account.
• Both the email’s body and its attachments (in supported file formats) will be processed to your account. Currently, the supported file formats are PDF, TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TXT, HTML, DOC, XLS, and PPT.
• The email’s subject line becomes the name of the document, for the email body. Attachment names will be preserved. So for example, if you receive an email with Subject “Invoice for December 2008″ with an attachment called “Acme-Corp-2008-Invoice.pdf”, you will find two documents in your pixily account, one called “Invoice for December 2008.html” and another called “Acme-Corp-2008-Invoice.pdf”.
• And to state the obvious, both the email body and the attachments will all be made searchable.
• If a document fails processing, an email will be sent so that you can inform the sender.

What about spam and how do I control who sends me email?

So am I going to get a lot spam in my account, you ask. Nope, not really. Our spam filters are among the best in the industry, so you can safely enable anyone to send you emails. But if you’d rather not do that, you can specify that only specific email addresses can send you email (and soon, you can authorize anyone from a specific domain). You can change this setting your email preferences accessed from the account page.

By default, only the email id that you provide while registering with pixily is enabled to send you email. So, if you provided johnorganizer@gmail.com while registering with OfficeDrop, you can already send emails from that email id. You can modify the settings as follows: (Click the image to view an enlarged version)

What are the benefits of this feature? How can I use it on a daily basis?

The possibilities that this feature enables and its associated benefits are limitless. Here are a few illustrative examples of how you can use this feature:

1. Automatically send online receipts to your pixily account while shopping online. All you have to do is to user your OfficeDrop email address. The same applies for online itineraries too.
2. Most multi-function printers, desktop and office scanners support the ability to “Scan to Email”. If you have a scanner, you can “Scan to email” any document and add it instantly to your pixily account. Document types supported by such scanners (TIFF, PDF, JPG) are all supported by OfficeDrop.
3. You can use your camera-phone to capture information to OfficeDrop. Take a picture of that receipt, or your favorite wine’s label and send it as an email attachment right from your phone.
4. You may setup filters in your email client, to automatically forward all emails (or emails with attachments) to your pixilymail id.
5. You can cc: or bcc: your pixilymail id so that you dont lose track of any email conversations that happen or to keep track of.

Not surprisingly, email is already becoming the most popular way to capturing data at OfficeDrop. How do you use the email feature as part of your workflow? Do you find it a time-saver? Do you fire and forget to your pixily account? Let us know.