Patent ID: 7515289

Claim:
A network printing system comprising a terminal device, a server, and a printing machine that are connected to each other via a network, wherein the printing machine comprises: an e-mail address acquiring unit which acquires an e-mail address of said terminal device; an address generating unit which generates a temporary address indicating a storage area of said server, said storage area being reserved to temporarily store image data which has not yet been received by the server; an e-mail transmitter which transmits an e-mail, which includes the temporary address generated by said address generating unit, to the e-mail address acquired by said e-mail address acquiring unit; a determiner which determines whether image data has been transmitted by said terminal device to be stored at the storage area designated by the temporary address; a receiver which accesses said server and designates the temporary address to receive image data transmitted by said server in response to the access, if said determiner determines that the image data has been transmitted by said terminal device to be stored at the storage area designated by the temporary address; and a printing unit which prints the image data received by said receiver; wherein the terminal device comprises: an image capturing unit which captures images of subjects and generates image data representing the captured images; an e-mail receiver which receives the e-mail including the temporary address, from said printing machine; and a transmitter which accesses the temporary address indicating the storage area of said server included in the e-mail received by said e-mail receiver, and which transmits image data generated by said image capturing unit to said server; and wherein said server comprises: an image receiver which receives the image data transmitted from said terminal device that has accessed the temporary address; a storage unit which stores the image data received by said image receiver at the storage area designated by the temporary address; and an image transmitter which transmits designated image data stored at the storage area designated by the temporary address in said storage unit, to said printing machine in response to the access by said printing machine designating the temporary address.