Posting Via Email

This post is not a question but rather my attempt to help people out who get stuck trying to make E-mail posts to their Word Press Blog. I’m posting this here looking for (kind) suggestions to improving it before I submit it to the ‘DOCS’ section of Word Press. Reading the Docs I saw that the information on this subject was marked as needing to be edited. From my experience getting my blog setup for myself I did see there were a lot of holes in the explanations as to what was needed. It is lengthy but I’m trying to provide clear instruction from start to finish. This is my attempt to help give back to the Word Press community. So with that, if you’re interested in checking this out and would like to offer words of correction or praise, please read on… and be gentle. ??

Post to your blog via E-mail.
This instruction is making a couple of assumptions at first.
It assumes that you have Word Press installed at your site host provider, that your blog is set up and that you can post from your ‘Posts’ section of your Dashboard.

When you have your WordPress up and running and you’re ready blog via email there are a few things you will need to address. I’ll give detailed explanation for each step later.

1. You will need to create a secret email address at your hosting provider.
2. You will need to login to your Word Press account and provide the mail server name, user name and password to allow Word Press to check for email at that account.
3. You will need to create a user in your WordPress account besides the admin one. (I’ll explain why later)
4. You will be editing the footer.php file if you want your posts to automatically authorize and publish. Otherwise you can perform manual authorization of a post.
5. You will be editing you wp-mail.php file. (This step is optional depending on whether or not you choose manual or automatic authorization).

So lets get started.

Step 1. Creating a secret email account.
For this step you will need to login to your user account at your site hosting provider. Find the ‘Email Account’ section and create an email account. Please note: When naming this email account use a name that would be difficult to guess. Use numbers and letters in the name. Some suggestions for names are given on the Word Press ‘Settings’ ‘Writing’ page under ‘Post Via Email’

You don’t have to use their string for the name but they do give you a good idea of what the name should consist of. Just know the more complex the name the more difficult it will be for anyone to “guess” the email address.

Once you’ve created the secret email account you need to record the following information:
Usename:
Incoming Mail Server name:
Password:

SPECIAL NOTE: For good measure do not give this email address out to anyone OR include it in any mass emails you may send out.

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Step 2. Configure Word Press to check the email account.
Login to Word Press and go to the Dashboard. Scroll down and on the left hand side find the “Settings” section. Beneath that look for “Writing” On the Writing page under the ‘Writing Settings’ look for ‘Post Via Email’ and fill in the information that you recorded from your hosting service provider. Mail server, login name & password. Fill them in and hit ‘Save Changes’

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Step 3. Create User account on Word Press.
Login to your Word Press account. From the Dashboard scroll down and find the ‘Users’ field and create a new user. (If you’d like you can just edit the Admin account but I’d suggest creating a new user) When you create this user you will fill in a few fields of information. There are several fields that can be filled in but only a couple that are required. One of which is the ‘E-mail’ field. Here you want to put the email address from which you will be sending your ‘Email Posts’ to your blog. NOTE: This address is NOT the secret email address we setup in Step 1. It’s the address you normally use everyday.
The other is ‘Nickname’. The Nickname is what will show up at the bottom of each post that you email in.

Explanation (time to get yourself a coffee, Red Bull, Monster or whatever it is you fancy… you deserve it!) :
Now…. the reason we want to create a Word Press USER, and fill in the required email with the address the posts will be coming from, is this.
When we’re done each time your Word Press blog refreshes it will look to at a file called wp-mail.php. In this file is a line of code that tells Word Press to check if the person (sending the email to be blogged) is an ‘Authorized user’. Having this account set up saves you from having to fiddle with changing more code & offers some security. This security feature prevents ‘just anyone’ from sending emails to your blog.

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Step 4. Editing the footer.php file.
Editing this file will cause your Word Press installation to check for mail at the secret email address each time your site is loaded or refreshed and, authorize & publish the post. The file can be found in your chosen theme directory of your Word Press installation. The code that follows is the code you need to put in the footer.php file. (Place this after </html> at the end of the footer.php file)

<iframe src=”https://www.yourdomain/wordpressinstalldir/wp-mail.php&#8221; name=”mailiframe” width=”0″ height=”0″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” title=””></iframe>

SPECIAL NOTE: The path (in this line of code) to the wp-mail.php file will differ a bit from what is shown in the example depending on two things:
1. Where you see ‘www.yourdomain’ ….you must put YOUR domain name
2. Where you see ‘wordpressinstalldir’ …you must put the name of the directory where Word Press was installed. (During the installation of Word Press at your hosting service provider you were asked what directory to install Word Press to.) If you left that field totally blank during the install procedure your Word Press is installed at the root… so you would simply remove the ‘wordpressinstalldir/’ from the line of code.

So it would look more like this:
<iframe src=”https://www.yourdomain/wp-mail.php&#8221; name=”mailiframe” width=”0″ height=”0″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” title=””></iframe>

Go get yourself a glass of wine or a beer or a shot of Cherry Cordial… you REALLY deserve it after all this! We’re almost done.

As of now you should be able to send an email to your secret email address FROM your everyday email account and see it show up in your blog. If it does NOT show up check the Dashboard under the ‘At A Glance’ section and look at ‘Post’. If your post is showing up there it most likely says ‘Pending’ meaning you must approve the post before it will make it to the actual blog page.
This can only mean Word Press cannot find the ‘Author’ listed in its’ database. (the Author is the email address from which the post came) Remember when we created the USER account in Step 3? The information given to Word Press in the USER account ‘E-mail’ section must match where the post is coming from. If it doesn’t match Word Press will set the email post as ‘Pending’ Make sure the Word Press ‘USER’ accounts email address is the same address from which you are sending out the email.

SPECIAL NOTE: If you wish to use multiple email accounts from which to post to your blog simply set up addition USER accounts in your Word Press database (Step 3) giving each user a unique Nickname & E-mail address.

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Step 5. Editing your wp-mail.php file.
This final step is an optional one and I’m including this only because it makes sense in my little pea brain.
Even though we have created USER accounts in our Word Press database other people could still send posts to our secret email account if it were discovered. Now the posts would all get a ‘Pending’ status (unless the rogue sender was very creative) and they (the posts) would need to be ‘Approved’. BUT… to be sure I get no unwanted posts to my blog or posts that show up in my Dashboard as ‘Pending’ I made the following change to my wp-mail.php file.
This file is found at the root of your web host directory. In it there is a line of code, starting around line 136, concerning the Author of a post. You can change the line that reads:
// Author not found in DB, set status to pending. Author already set to admin.
$post_status = ‘pending’;

to read

// Author not found in DB, set status to delete. Author already set to admin.
$post_status = ‘delete’;

I’ve found that this will cause any ‘Post Emails’ that come from unauthorized users to be deleted. They don’t even make it to the ‘Pending’ status.

Go ahead and treat yourself to something special like a glass of your favorite beverage or a slice of your favorite homemade pie. With Ice cream of course! I hope this posting helps someone out there wishing they could get their email posting to work!