How to ‘Post by Email’ on WordPress

‘Post by Email’ is a way of publishing posts on your blog by email. You can now do this easily if you are using WordPress.org (not the free WordPress from wordpress.com). Any email client can be used to send the email, allowing you to publish quickly and easily from devices such as cell phones.

 
Generating a Post by Email Address

Before you can publish by email, you must first install Jetpack by WordPress and then generate a special email address. This address is unique to you and must be kept secret (anyone that knows the email address can publish a post to your blog). If there are multiple authors on the blog, each person must connect separately to get a separate special email address.

 
To generate your special email address;

1. Make sure that the Post by Email module is activated in Jetpack.
2. Make sure that your user account is connected in WordPress.com
3. Go to Users -> Your Profile.
4. Locate the Post by Email section.
5. Click the “Enable Post by Email” button.

You now have a special email address to use for your blog.

 
Sending Emails

Once you have your ‘Post by Email’ address, sending an email is simple:

 
The email subject is used as your post’s title. The body is the post’s contents. A few minutes after receiving your email, you should receive a notification email informing you of the published post’s details.

Note: Please remember to send the email to your secret email address, not to the example given in the image above.

 
Mail Formatting

Your email can be plain text or formatted. As much formatting as possible will be retained, although the Post by Email system will strip unnecessary HTML tags so that your email is displayed correctly. Note that you will need to use an email client that supports rich text or HTML formatting in order to make use of this feature. Most website based clients (Hotmail, Gmail) do support this, as do most desktop clients (Outlook, Mail). You may need to switch your client into rich text or formatted mode.
Attachments

 
Image attachments will be included in your published post as follows:

- Single images will be displayed inline (a single image is defined as an image without an image immediately following it).
- Multiple images will be displayed as a gallery.

 
Special shortcodes can be embedded in your email to configure various aspects of the published post:

 
[category x,y,z]
[excerpt]some excerpt[/excerpt]
[tags x,y,z]
[delay +1 hour]
[comments on | off]
[status publish | pending | draft | private]
[password secret-password]
[slug some-url-name]
[title Your post title]
[end] – everything after this shortcode is ignored (i.e. signatures). Make sure it’s on its own line with a blank line above it.
– replaces the auto-gallery with a slideshow
[nogallery] – disables the auto-gallery and displays all images inline
[more] – more tag
[nextpage] – pagination
[geotag on | off] – override your geotagging privacy defaults to enable or disable the showing of geo information
[publicize off|yahoo|twitter|facebook] – change Publicize options (see below)
[poll]question and answers[/poll] – insert a Polldaddy poll into your post (see below)

 
Shortcodes can be included anywhere in the body of your email and must be in lowercase. There should be no spaces between the left square bracket and the shortcode content.

 
Specifying the Category

The category shortcode will match the start of category titles, as well as category IDs. For example:

[category Hol,Fo]

Will match “Holiday” and “Food.” Note that categories must already exist on your blog and spaces between the commas are not important.

 
Specifying Tags

Any number of tags can be added to your post, each separated by a comma:

[tags one potato, two potato, three potato, more]

This will add four tags: “one potato”, “two potato”, “three potato”, and “more”. Note that your tags do not need to exist elsewhere in your blog and new tags will be created automatically.

 

Originally posted 2012-12-25 17:10:50.