A pattern we kept hearing from readers: you open a newsletter, a lengthy company memo, or a friend’s dispatch, and you want to save it for the Kobo or Kindle. But it’s an email, not a URL. The browser extension didn’t know what to do with it.

That changes today. The Passages extension now works inside Gmail.

How it works

Open any email in Gmail. Click the Passages extension icon. If the email has enough body text to be worth saving — a newsletter, a long essay, a well-written thread — it is extracted and sent to your library the same way any article would be.

The extension handles both Chrome and Firefox and works with both the standard Gmail view and the compact reading pane.

The article will land in your library nicely formatted for reading in your e-reader, with the same quality we provide for other articles.

What it’s good for

Text-heavy emails are where this shines. Newsletters published directly as email — the ones without a “view in browser” link, or where the web version is a stripped-down afterthought, are now first-class citizens in Passages.

Same for:

• Company announcements and internal memos you want to read later, without distraction
• Long threads forwarded to you that read more like articles than correspondence
• Reading digests where the content is the email, not a list of links to elsewhere

Short transactional emails, image-heavy promotions, and threaded conversations are a poor fit — the extractor works best when there is a sustained body of prose to work with.

Getting the extension

If you do not have the extension installed yet, it is available for Chrome and Firefox. Sign in with your Passages account and the library connection is automatic.

If you already have it installed, there is nothing to update — this works in the version you have.

Passages is a tool for collecting long-form reading and taking it with you on a Kobo or Kindle. The extension is one part of that; the app is the other. +++