Push to Kindle, FiveFilters.org’s web service for sending web articles to your Kindle, can now also be used by e-mail. The email service is aimed at iPad and iPhone users.
Here’s a video showing you how to use it on your iPad or iPhone:
Step by step
- On your device, load an article you’d like to send to your Kindle
- Choose share page
- In the list of options presented, select Mail
- Enter your Kindle email address but instead of @kindle.com, enter @pushtokindle.com
- Send!
Changing the ending to @pushtokindle.com in step 4 ensures our service processes the article first and then sends it to your Kindle account.
The first time you do this, you’ll receive an email from FiveFilters.org asking you to confirm the address you’re sending from. After confirming, you’ll have the opportunity to save your Push to Kindle email address in your contacts list to make future sending easier. (Simply typing ‘kin’ in to the To: field should show your Push to Kindle address as an option.)
If you own a 3G Kindle device and you want to make sure you will not be charged by Amazon, please send to @free.pushtokindle.com. (For the time being we are only sending to @free.kindle.com, but this might change in future.)
Why an e-mail service?
We already have a Push to Kindle Android app. It adds ‘Push to Kindle’ as an entry in your device’s share menu, so whenever you want to send a web article to your Kindle, you bring up the share menu and choose Push to Kindle.
We considered doing the same for iOS and other mobile devices, but decided to focus on email for two reasons:
- Unlike Android, iOS and Windows Phone operating systems do not yet allow apps to add entries to the share menu.
- The share menu on most mobile devices does, however, include e-mail as an option
Pricing
The first 25 articles processed by our e-mail service are free, after that you’ll be asked to purchase credits — this allows us to maintain the service.
100 credits cost 1.5€ (around £1.20 or $2)
Each article sent uses 1 credit. You will receive an email notice when your credits are low.
Note: credits are linked to the email address you send from, not your Kindle address.
Compared to Amazon’s email service
Amazon’s Send to Kindle email service currently works by accepting documents as attachments to an email message.
Web articles you read online are usually not in a format that can be sent to your Kindle account directly. They need to be cleaned up and converted to a suitable format first. That’s what our Push to Kindle service does. We take care of extracting the content and converting the article to a suitable format for your Kindle. We then send the result as an attachment to your Kindle account.
Bear in mind
We’re working to integrate this service with our sustainer membership. Once that’s done this service will be free for new and existing sustainers.
All articles are currently considered equal: 1 credit = 1 article. In the future this may change. For example, in line with our goal to encourage use of non-corporate sources, we’ll be white listing many non-corporate sources so no credits will be used if you process articles from these sources. Conversely, we may deduct more credits for articles originating from corporate sources.
Please consider this an experimental service. Let us know if you experience any issues and we’ll be happy to help. Email help@fivefilters.org.
