Howto: Post to your Wordpress blog by email
- Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
- Guides howto Interesting Wordpress
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You can post to your Wordpress blog via email without installing any additional plugin. Basically how it works is: you send an email to an assigned email address → the email gets published as a new post on your blog → everyone’s happy with this and we all live happily ever after. Here’s a short tutorial on how to get it working in no time.
First, you have to create an email address on your server
If you don’t have control of this and/or you don’t know how to do it best to ask your server admin, I cannot help you much on this area.
Every email sent to this address will be posted to your blog, so make the email address unique and hard to guess; like Ybeu6QW@yourdomain.com. Note the email address and password because you’ll need this (ya of course lah!).
The next step is to setup Wordpress to receive mail from the address
The setting is located on yourwpsite.com/wp-admin/options-writing.php and it looks like this ↓
There you can enter the login information for that unique email you created earlier. Usually if the email is name@domain.com; the mail server is mail.domain.com. Use full email address as login name and the port is 110. Default mail category is self explanatory, if you don’t understand that then it’s a miracle that you’re reading this far.
Tip: It’s a good idea to test the email with your favorite mail client first (like Outlook or Thunderbird) before proceeding to the next step just to see if it works.
Now on to sending the email
The rules are simple:
- The subject line will be used as the Post Title
- The message body will be used as the Post Content
- Wordpress will strip common HTML tags. To play safe, I use plain text when testing this.
Publishing the post
Tho it seems a bit odd, but you need to pull the trigger yourself to actually publish the post to your Wordpress blog. After sending the post email you can do this by accessing the URL yoursite.com/wp-mail.php.
If everything goes well, the page will show something like this (actual posted article can be seen here):
It’s a hassle, yes, but there is an alternative way so you don’t have to do that. It is by entering this HTML snippet on the end of your post:
<iframe src="http://yoursite.com/wp-mail.php" name="mailiframe" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title=""></iframe>That way everytime you send an email to the assigned address it gets published instantly. Cool eh? But one thing I don’t really understand. How can we benefit from this feature? Anyone have any idea?
Thanks for the info.
how to post to wordpress blog using telepathy?
@dental: let’s hope the feature is implemented on 3.0 :D
@above : on Web 3.0 or WP 3.0 ? :p
@bodhi: maybe both yah? :D
good acticle,
but, when we need to post by email?
@wira: exactly. still a mystery for me :D
wow nice..easy but so deep… apaan sih :D
@anggi: easy but so deep? interesting phrase :D
nice. will try it soon. i am using a blackberry so i think writing a post via email will be very much useful for me. thanks.
it doesnt work yet. the email has appeared as a post, but it has the subject only, without the body of the email. so, it just like an empty post. what’s wrong ya…?
@fisto: You have to send the email using plain text, with no html formatting. Let me know if it works yah?
yap. i’ll try. later. with your guidance. :)
ken2 kbarmu, prim? mbok yo sekali2 soal dirimu gitu loh. dan pake basa indonesia, biar aku ngerti. :D
@anton: Qiqiqiqi, sip2 mas. Soal aku? Walah, ya ga ada yg menarik lah soalan aku mas :D