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Help Is there an easy way to print e-mail (non G-mail) from MAXX?

L

Lionel777

Lurker
My wife just upgraded to the MAXX. Her previous phone was the Samsung Galaxy S3. She printed e-mail from our personal account on the S3 and wants to be able to do so on the MAXX. The Samsung operating system allowed this via printershare. It worked fine even with formatted e-mails.

When I opened an email on the MAXX using the stock e-mail app, I could not find a print or share option. I opened the g-mail app and easily found the print option. Did a test print from g-mail and everything worked great.

I searched a bunch of e-mail apps on the play store as a replacement for the stock mail app. I was looking for anything with a print or share option as well as a widget (4x4). Aquamail was the best solution I could find. It offered a share button so I could send and e-mail to printershare and a nice widget. I printed a plain text e-mail and it worked fine. I told my wife I fixed it and was relieved.

UNFORTUNATELY, the first e-mail she tried to print was formatted text and although it printed, it was a mess (lots of HTML code preceding the actual text). I tried the same e-mail on the S3 and it printed perfectly.

Can anybody help? My wife wanted the S4 and I talked her into the MAXX. Now, she's not happy and I feel a bit foolish about the decision.
 
Do you use Google Cloud Print at all (or are these HP printers)? If so, you can install the Cloud Print app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauloslf.cloudprint) which will be added to the share menu.

That still won't help you with the stock mail client, but it will work with the free email client K9 mail (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9). That app, with a message open, can share an email message to the share intents, one of which can be printer(s) you've defined in the Google Cloud Print app.

One last thing: if the email account she is checking can be checked from a web browser, for any message that she wants to print she can open the mail in Chrome on the phone and print from there, I think.

(I never print email from my phone, but these ideas should work.)

Of course, the last idea is to exchange the Maxx for an S4 if you are within the 14 day exchange period.
 
Thanks for the tips guys. They are helpful, but I'm not quite where I want to be yet. I really need a clean and simple solution for my wife.

Here is some additional info I should have included in the original post.

- I have an older HP printer (6500 wireless). It is connected to my network; but not fully Cloud print compatible; thus a computer is required to make Cloud print work.
- I used cloud print previously, but since my printer is older, I need to have my laptop function as a server. This is problematic since I travel a lot and my wife can't print when I'm gone since I take the laptop with me.
- I used the printershare app (paid version) which supports printing to a nearby WiFi connected printer with my wife's Galaxy S3.
- I installed the HP plugin on the MAXX and can successfully print from every app that supports native printing (including G-mail).
- The Kit Kat e-mail app does not offer a print option or a share option, so I could not print from it.
- I figured if I could find a 3rd party e-mail app that supported the Share function, I could use printershare. I looked at a lot of e-mail apps in the play store and settled on Aqua Mail. It offers the widget I need and the share function. I can share e-mails from within Aqua mail to printershare and they print successfully on my HP printer. Plain text is fine. Any formatted e-mail is not correctly interpreted and thus the output is unacceptable. This is where I decided to try the forum for help.

Any solution that requires Cloud Print is a non-starter since my printer is old and requires a computer to act as a server.

QUESTION: Can I add Chrome to the list of applications I can share TO? If so, could I share a an HTML formatted e-mail from the e-mail client with Chrome and then print from Chrome? When I look at the list of apps I can share with, I don't see Chrome listed.
 
One other idea (and this is what I do on my phone, though I don't print.) If your wife's mail server supports it, set it to automatically forward mail to a gmail account. Gmail can be set up to reply to other mail addresses (set up from settings on a PC browser in gmail's web site) and to reply using the account the mail was originally sent to. That will get her push mail with the gmail client and the ability to print. (In the gmail settings on a PC browser, you can also set a filter to label all messages sent to that email address, to distinguish them from gmail messages.)

It's also a bit kludgy, but, for me, it gives me one client to receive all mail messages, with a universal inbox, and push mall on android.
 
Lionel777 said:
- I figured if I could find a 3rd party e-mail app that supported the Share function, I could use printershare. I looked at a lot of e-mail apps in the play store and settled on Aqua Mail. It offers the widget I need and the share function. I can share e-mails from within Aqua mail to printershare and they print successfully on my HP printer. Plain text is fine. Any formatted e-mail is not correctly interpreted and thus the output is unacceptable. This is where I decided to try the forum for help.
Click to expand...

Well, give K9 mail a shot. It's a free app, and it can share a message. Maybe it can share an HTML formatted message the right way using Printershare? I'm not sure what you need from the widget, but it has a 1x1 widget that shows the number of unread messages and brings you to the list of messages in an account.
 
Thanks everybody for all the suggestions. As an update, I tried K9. Like Aqua Mail, I was able to share with Printershare and print plain text e-mails successfully. With formatted e-mails, the headers just printed as HTML text and the output was unacceptable.

I tried a couple different cloud print programs just to see if Printershare might be the problem and got the same results.

I'm giving up for now. It works with plain text and she really doesn't print e-mails that often. Worst case, she can forward the e-mail to me and I can print it for her.

Thanks again.
 
Doogald, I think I am going to try to use G-mail as the unified e-mail client as you suggested earlier. I read a few posts on how best to do this. Looks like I can set up GoDaddy to forward the messages to G-mail OR set up G-mail to poll GoDaddy. I currently have IMAP service with GoDaddy. Which method are you currently using and can you see an advantage to either?
 
Lionel777 said:
Doogald, I think I am going to try to use G-mail as the unified e-mail client as you suggested earlier. I read a few posts on how best to do this. Looks like I can set up GoDaddy to forward the messages to G-mail OR set up G-mail to poll GoDaddy. I currently have IMAP service with GoDaddy. Which method are you currently using and can you see an advantage to either?
Click to expand...

I used to use gmail fetch, where gmail fetches mail (using POP3) from the foreign mail server. The problem with this? It's not timely - mail is fetched on a schedule that gmail's servers determine is the most efficient.

If you auto-forward mail from the server to your gmail account, mail is delivered instantly. So, this is what I use.

There are some settings I did in gmail as well. I'm not in front of a computer at the moment (I'm on my iPad), but you go into settings, accounts and import, and add that email address as a "send mail as" and follow the prompts. Also I make sure that just below "reply from the same address message was sent to" is selected, so any replies I make from within the gmail app use the other address as the reply address.

Next, under filters, I put in a search for "to:myemail@address.com" and add it to a label I've created with that email address. (Replace the myemail@address.com with the real email address.) That just makes it easier to distinguish the messages.

That's what I do; I have several email addresses set to forward to gmail.
 
Doogald, I think I have everything set up. I used the CC feature of GoDaddy e-mail to send a copy of every e-mail to the Gmail account. I then set up the Godaddy auto purge feature to delete the e-mails after 365 days. I had to use CC instead of a forward account since you cannot send mail from a forward account. Now, my wife's personal e-mail is the default and everything she sends has her personal e-mail address; not xxx@gmail.com on behalf of [personal email account].

She's still getting used to the g-mail widget, but everything seems to be working well otherwise.

Thanks for the help.
 
I'm glad it's working. Hopefully Motorola will add printing to the stock mail client and you can go back to that in a future update.
 
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