How to use email to publish wordpress posts
Post by Email is a way of publishing posts on your blog by email. 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 generate a special email address. This address is unique to you and must be kept secret.
1) Dashboard > My Blogs
2) Locate the blog that you wish to publish to and click on Enable.
You now have a special email address. If you want to add the address to your addressbook you can download it as a vCard:
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, with the body being the post contents. A few minutes after receiving your email you should receive a notification email informing you of the published post’s details.
Please remember to send the email to your secret email address, not to the example given in the image above.
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.
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.
Multiple galleries and single images are allowed in the same post. Note that using the [nogallery] shortcode will disable all galleries.
If you have purchased the Space Upgrade then the following additional attachment types will be supported:
- Supported audio files (mp3) will be displayed using the WordPress Audio player.
- All other files (zips, PDF, etc) will be displayed as links to the attachment.
Additionally, if you’ve purchased VideoPress Upgrade you’ll be able to send mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg and m4v files as attachments which will then be displayed using the WordPress Video player.
Note that all attachments are subject to space limitations.
Shortcodes
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][password secret-password][slug some-url-name][title Your post title][end]– everything after this shortcode is ignored (i.e. signatures)[nogallery]– disables the auto-gallery and displays all images inline
Shortcodes can be included anywhere in the body of your email and must be in lowercase.
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.
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.
Delaying Your Post
The delay shortcode will accept any time allowed by PHP’s strtotime. For example, you can:
[delay +1 hour]
[delay +2 days]
Providing a post title
The title of your published post is usually taken from the subject line of your email. In some instances, such as when sending an email from some cell phones or via a MMS-Email gateway, you may not be able to provide a subject. In this instance you can set your post title directly inside the email:
[title My Fancy Post]
Signatures
Post by email will automatically remove any email signatures that match the standard signature block pattern:
--
(that is dash dash space)
It will also remove anything after a <hr/> HTML tag.
If your email system attaches a signature that does not match any of these patterns then you can manually tell Post by Email to stop including text by adding the special [end] shortcode. Anything after this will be removed from your post.
Example Email with Shortcodes
The following email will be published in 2 days time to the ‘WordPress’ category, with tags ‘announcement’ and ‘wordpress’:
Welcome to Post by Email, the easiest way to blog!
[tags announcement, wordpress]
[category word]
[delay +2 days]
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