Blogging by email using Postie Plugin
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Is not easy to maintain a blog if you have to login to a website all the time. Postie allows you to update your blog by email.
Step 1: Download the postie plugin at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/
Step 2: Make sure you have the correct version of WordPress installed.
Step 3: Install Postie by clicking on Plugins on the left hand menu of WordPress admin login. Click Install and then activate the plugin.
These instructions are copied from WordPress:
Make sure all postie code is its own directory inside of wp-content/plugins/postie
Make two directories in your main wordpress directory wp-filez and wp-photos
Make sure these directories are writable by your web server (chmod 777 or chown to the webserver — the permissions should be the same as wp-content/uploads)
make sure that the postie directory that this file is in is moved to yourwebsite/wp-content/plugins
Login to WordPress as an administrator
Goto the Plugins tab in the WordPress Admin Site
Activate “Postie”
Goto to the “Options” tab and click on the sub-tab “Configure Postie” to configure it.
(Postie ignores the settings under Options->Writing->Writing-by-Email)
Pay attention to the bold items
The wp-filez and wp-photos are folders which has to be created in the wordpress blog directory and not under the postie directory. The instruction given in WordPress is ambiguous.
Step 4: Click on Configure Postie under Setting in Admin login at the bottom. Once you are in Postie, go right to the bottom to configure the Mail Setting. Avoid using gmail, yahoo mails. Use POP mails. You need a confidential email account which you would send your update to your blog via this email.
To make sure your configuration is correct, click on the test and run postie on top. If it is ok the brower will bring you to a blank page showing that mails are being read and downloaded.
Step 6: There are two ways to get the blog to download your email and post it into the blog. You can Cron job or you can use iframe.
I prefer using iframe. Essentially you need to insert this iframe script into the footer.php of the theme you are using. The footer.php
iframe src=”http://laughter.mhcasia.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php” name=”mailiframe” width=”0″ height=”0″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” title=”">
Replace laughter.mhcasia.com with your Blog URL.
Step 7. Send a blog update to the dedicated confidential email account you have created. Hit F5 to refresh the browser and you can see your blog being updated.
Step 8. Format for Email Blogs
Subject is the Title of the Blog Article
If you want to categorize it prefix the subject with [Cat ABC][Cat CDE] Title of Blog Article
You can add as many of the pre-defined Category as you like.
If you want to add tags, add this at the bottom of the article in this format:
tags : abc, cde, fgh
tags must be in small Cap otherwise it wouldn’t work.
Image Handling
Postie allows you to attach images to your email and automatically post them to your blog.Large images are automatically thumbnailed and linked to the larger image.
You can publish images in the text of your message by using #img1# #img2# – each one will be replaced with the HTML for the image you attached
Captions – you can also add a caption like so: img1 caption=’foo’ img2 caption=’bar’
No. 1 — May 15th, 2009 at 9:07 AM
Thanks alot for this post. I have been scratching my head all day about getting postie to fetch the emails. Your post helped alot.
No. 2 — May 15th, 2009 at 11:14 AM
You are most welcome.
No. 3 — May 28th, 2009 at 5:16 AM
It’s always good to find like-minded people. Thanx and I’m going to add you to my RSS feed.
No. 4 — June 7th, 2009 at 6:51 PM
Hi Titus
Great article. I appreciate you adding your comments to this poorly written text. It’s amazing how many people write incomplete instructions, as if somehow the rest of us are psychic.
So, I’m having a fundamental problem. I am using the full username, and feel like I’ve changed every variable possible, and yet I still can’t post correctly.
I cannot post using gmail or yahoo at all. That’s a definite. My http://gator868.hostgator.com/~rodders/wp-mail.php always says “POP3 quit: connection does not exist”.
That’s ok, cos I can post using a free gmx.com e-mail account, “run postie”, or http://gator868.hostgator.com/~rodders/wp-mail.php shows any mail posted. BUT I need help. It only posts plain text. It won’t post rich text or images.
Secondly, when I moved my wp-filez and wp-photos folders to the postie directory I cannot “run postie” (although wp-mail still works), and it says the filez & photos directories are unwritable. Anyways, the first issue is the real kicker.
And yes, I have Prefered Text Type (HTML/plain): set to html
Any ideas?
Thanks
James
No. 5 — June 7th, 2009 at 7:29 PM
This is the comment from my webhost:
777 permissions on folders and files is a website security risk, so we do not allow you to have them.
Most hosting companies now use phpSuExec servers, thus 755 will allow you to install, run, and execute scripts just like 777 does. Because of this, most scripts do not mind if you use 755
But I’m not sure how this relates to the rich text problem anyway
No. 6 — June 7th, 2009 at 9:25 PM
Who’s the fing man with a plan stan, yeah that’s me. Fixed it.
Ok, I hope this works for Lis or anyone else with this problem.
I tried the following trial and errors until I got to the root, so maybe don’t waste your time with these.
I thought maybe the permissions on the wp-filez, wp-photos and uploads was the problem. Firstly, my host won’t allow 777 access. But anyway, 766, or 755 works.
Secondly, I realised I also had the built in “post by e-mail” activated. Infact, the plain posts which I was able to send were ONLY coming through that. Once I deactivated “post by e-mail”, I got no posts, so Postie wasn’t even working.
In a nutshell, I removed everything related to postie. Deactivated and deleted all plugins, Crons, whatever.
Then searched for “postie” in wordpress plugin directory, and loaded Postie 1.3 Alpha. That’s all you need. In this version, all the sections are now in tabs along the top e.g. User, Message, Image.
Essentially what was screwing me up was I was running off of Cronless Postie Plugin 1.3
I think my rule of thumb now is, if something don’t work, uninstall and start over.
Hope it works!
No. 7 — June 7th, 2009 at 10:47 PM
Hi James, So have you resolved the problem. Which version of Word Press and Postie are you using. Are you using Hostgator? If you follow my instruction on my blog here, the postie should work very smoothly.
I can post photos, videos , add tags and categories. Is quite simple.
No. 8 — June 9th, 2009 at 11:52 PM
Hey James,
I’m having problms posting video from my nokia phone. It shows the quick time logo, but can’t do anything else, link is above.
Any suggestions?
Cheers,
Morgan.
PS I’m just getting ready to fire the blog up.
No. 9 — June 10th, 2009 at 12:40 AM
Try to upload the video to youtube first then paste the youtube on to your html formatted email to post the video to the blog.
No. 10 — September 14th, 2009 at 6:34 PM
Everything is working, but it cant show the images. I get only the texts. Can anyone help me?
joco1114@gmail.com