Yesterday, before I had the Kindle 2 in my hand, I set up my Kindle 2 in the “Manage Your Kindle” section in my Amazon account. I added some authorized email addresses so that I could email documents directly to the Kindle (with Amazon automatically converting them to the Amazon format of .AZW). Obviously I didn’t have my Kindle 2 yet, so I sent a test document to myusername@free.kindle.com, and I received an automatically converted Amazon Kindle file via a response email with the .AZW file attached.

This morning, I successfully transfered that file over to my Kindle 2 when it was connected to my MacBook Pro. The file looks great! The formatting is not perfect, but I’m willing to live with that for now.

However, tonight (February 24th, around 8:00PM PST) neither the myusername@kindle.com or the myusername@free.kindle.com addresses are responding. The mail is successfully delivered, but then there is no sign of the converted documents on my Kindle 2, or my email account.

Are Amazon’s conversion servers overloaded due to a lot of extra Kindle 2 deliveries today? Anyone have the inside track?

UPDATE 2/25/2009 10:45AM:

The Kindle document conversion servers have certainly been delayed. Amazon does send the converted documents, but it takes about 15+ minutes. This is different from two days ago when conversions were nearly instant (1-2 minutes at most). Amazon is likely spending some time to make the service scale a little more.