While I really enjoy working on my iPad, occasionally I run into roadblocks on it. One such roadblock is my desire to save an email as a PDF file. I’m not talking about a PDF attachment to an email file but the actual email itself. For instance, if I buy something on Amazon and I want to keep the receipt for future reference, Amazon sends me an email telling me about my purchase. I want to print that email to PDF and save it to a folder. This is really easy on the Mac. It is not so easy on the iPad or iPhone. There is no Print to PDF command on iOS. So I usually stick these types of emails in my Action Folder and deal with it when I’m sitting at my Mac later. However, the fact that I can’t deal with it on my iOS device does make me a little crazy. I bemoaned this on a recent episode of Mac Power Users and, of course, one of our clever listeners answered the call.

Brian Almeida has just released a Web service at PDFConvert.me that solves this problem. You can forward any email to the service and it will convert the email to PDF and reply to you with the newly minted PDF as an email attachment. Of course you are sending an email to a third party so this isn’t appropriate for confidential email but I could do this for my Amazon receipts all day long.

At this point, it’s a beta service and he’s trying to figure out the business model. Either way, I think there is a demand for the service and I’m already using it. If you’ve also wanted the ability to turn email into a PDF effortlessly from an iOS device, go check this out. Brian has also been adding features. For instance, if you send a Microsoft Word document to your magic PDFConvert.me email address, it’ll spit back a PDF of that file to you as well.

∞