US Patent 7321437 E-mail to job retention

The present invention relates to a system and method for transmitting and storing print jobs sent via e-mail. A first embodiment entails sending a document to be printed as an e-mail attachment to an e-mail enabled printer. The printer extracts the document from the e-mail attachment and performs any necessary decompression, decoding, and translation. The document may be placed in a print queue for printing and/or the document may be stored in a job retention area of printer memory. Preferably, the e-mail, which delivers the print job to the document to the printer, may specify various print settings for printing the document, as well as storage options and access rights if the document data is stored in job retention.