Downside is you have to email the documents you want to print to Brother (the company).

Think about that before you email anything you want to keep private.

Funny how the article seems to be selling this as "not innovating". I was genuinely surprised when I discovered that it was just a social media post and not some ad-entrusted clickbait repackaging that theverge.com article while trying to one-up it with the "no innovation" claim.

Like this slice of journalism?

https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...

lol, end of article:

"And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again."

(followed by chatgpt output)

"Tech innovation" these days means gating hardware features behind a subscription tier like BMW or Tesla do.

They have done that for as long as they have been internet connected.

Can one guess printers email addresses and start spamming random printers?

I dont see any way to register the sender's expected email on the printer. Back to fax spamming...?

Someone did that to my old HP printer a couple times, but there were settings to only accept emails from specific addresses that I eventually turned on.

Well you can customise it with the brother printer. Brother itself registers your unique email id against your registered device, hence it has to be globally unique.

Where do I find this email?

Brother provide a default unique email id with your device but you can customise it, the id has be globally unique as Brother registers it.