Mail to Self Share Extension
A couple months back, I tweeted that the iOS 8 share-sheet extension I really wanted was one that would let me send myself an email—in other words, to share the current thing via email, but to have the resulting email message pre-addressed to me.
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I’ve long wanted that, too. He found one called Mail to Self (App Store).
Unfortunately:
This may be a quirk with iOS 8’s share sheets, which are still quite buggy, but I’ve found that Mail To Self doesn’t show up as an option in some apps or contexts. For example, it doesn’t appear as an option in the Photos share sheet. I also don’t like that the extension sends your messages through its own mail server, instead of just using Mail on your device. (Maybe this is a limitation of extensions—I don’t know.)
It’s also worth noting that this is not a shortcut for e-mailing yourself through the iOS Mail app and your mail server. Rather, the e-mails are sent via Mandrill’s server.
Update (2014-12-05): From Frakes’ update, my guess is that the Photos limitation is due to the extension not yet declaring support for that media type.
Update (2014-12-27): Another problem I found is that the extension doesn’t work (or even report an error) when my iPhone doesn’t have a network connection, whereas if I use Mail it will queue the message and send it when a connection becomes available.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
I'm afraid this is a solution in search of a problem. Want to save a link? Save to your Reading List (or Instapaper or Pocket). Want to send yourself a not? Use a notes app! Otherwise, take 10 seconds and use the share-sheet to manually enter your email address and send it to yourself. Seriously, how many emails/day have y'all wanted to send yourselves (given the alternatives)?
And there's no way I'd send all my notes/thoughts/links through some random dev's mailserver anyway. That's a privacy fail.
@Cole Perhaps things are better now, but I’ve seen cases where sharing to Instapaper didn’t work properly for a tweet with no link or multiple links. And what if you want to share some text that didn’t originate on the Internet? Also, I treat my mail inbox as higher priority than Instapaper, so it’s nice to be able to choose which bucket something goes into. All that said, now that iOS 8 supports sharing to OmniFocus the need to e-mail to myself is much lower.
