I am sure most computer-savvy readers can relate to this: family gatherings involve good food, good times, and providing computer help.
This Christmas was no exception; in between bites of lefse (the only Norwegian thing my family does), my dad, who uses a Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 (the precursor of the ScanSnap S1300) was having trouble emailing his genealogy stuff.
He asked me how he could use his ScanSnap to email using Gmail rather than Outlook. I thought it might make a good post, so here we are.
In Windows, the ScanSnap will use your default email client. So the task becomes, how do you set Gmail as your default mail client?
As with most things, there are a bunch of different solutions. The most common one is to use the Gmail Notifier. When you install that, you can check the box to make Gmail your default client. I don’t know if it is because I am on 64-bit Windows 7 or because Larry & Sergey hate me, but I just could not get it to work on my computer. Whatever I did, it still used Windows Live Mail.
I ended up using a free little app called Affixa. Affixa has a number of features but the main ones I care about here are that it allows you to use Gmail, Google Apps, or Yahoo Mail as your default Windows mail client.
Set Up Affixa
When you first run it, you can add your accounts and then set a few options for each account.
For me, I set it to launch Gmail after creating a draft message and use HTTPS for added security.
Set Up ScanSnap Manager
On the ScanSnap side, I used the built-in Scan To E-Mail profile. On the Application tab it has Scan to E-mail, and then when you click the Application Settings button, there are a few settings that you might want to take a look at.
I personally like to have “Show preview” popped up so that I can set a filename, and if you want to keep a PDF copy of the document, check “Save scanned images to file”.
After all that, set up the other Profile options on the other tabs as desired.
Sending The Email
Once you have your setup done, just put some documents in the ScanSnap and hit the scan button. Affixa will show that it is logging in, and then if you checked “Launch Gmail” then it will take you right to your message. If not, go to Gmail, go to the Drafts folder, and there it will be.
As I said, Affixa has way more functionality than what I have described here, so check out the site if you want to know more.
What About The Mac?
I’m afraid I don’t have good news here. Google has an improved Google Notifier for Mac that I thought would do the trick, but no luck. When I tried scanning, ScanSnap Manager popped up a message specifically saying that it needed to use Mail.app or Entourage.app. Why, I have no idea.
If you have come up with a Mac solution or have another Windows method that works for you, drop a note in the comment and let us know.
