WordPress MU

good morning

to start with: i have read all posts here that i found with the keywords "post" and "email". and i did not find an answer.

i use WPMU 2.7.1 and i would really like to post my articles using mail (as my website's timeout is too short to post it through XML using a slot GPRS connection).

i am simply unable to get it running: unlike WP 2.7.1, there is not option in Options->Writing to set an email account. i have also tried Postie, but whenever i save the options there and try to save them, it says they are saved but they have disappeared from the form (directories are there, resizing works).

can anyone help me on this one.

THANKS A LOT!
mercator

found a solution: the current development version of Postie actually works with WPMU.

Actually the settings are in Site Admin -> Blogs -> Edit Blog. Surprised that you didn't find a thread covering that as it's been discussed a number of times. For example:

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1857

It's something that the site admin needs to set up for the end users. Many site admins don't due it for security/ spamming concerns and others do it as a paid addon.

It is odd that all the post by email systems seem to rely on the WPMU site going OUT to third party email servers rather than monitoring an incoming email box and then processing that which is how things like LiveJournal do it.

I'm a bit lost, Steve, as that's how we have ours setup. Using a cron, it checks every so often a mailbox setup for the blog

So you have a mail box for each blog on your email server rather than relying on going out to an external server for each blog?

Depends on the install. Since it's a manual setup, some of our site admins ignore it while others do it as a paid upgrade. And some do it on request. But yes, the email server is local and for those who do it, there's a mailbox for each blog.

A strong suggestion not to match up the email accounts with the name of the blog or in any sort of pattern that is recognizable as being attached to the blog or site. Having the feature opens you up to spammers trying to hit the inbox to get their posts placed on the blogs. We used to do the site domain written backwards with the blog id md5'ed as the inbox name. We do something different now though.

Hmmm, never thought about doing it as an outside mailbox. We always did it locally. We usually stay away from relying on outside tools or resources.

Well thats why I've never looked at the post by mail because it seemed to want to go out to fetch email which would mean, if you had a lot of blogs, of potentially polling hundreds of external email accounts.

I like the way LJ does it where you combine the blog name with a PIN which can be in the email address, the subject or the first line of the message body. Or you can use a PGP sig instead of a pin. But you can only post from email addresses registered against the account.

I'm not sure if LJ have major problems with spam but I guess if they did they'd discontinue the service

if you had a lot of blogs

Agreed which is why most of the installs, if they do it, make it a paid upgrade. :)

To be honest, considering that the software uses the default category as the category to place the emailed posts, that turns a fair number of folks off. I'm sure there's ways around that but I;ve never had the chance to look into it.

The obvious way is to allow people to put tags in the top of the message to set various things.

Thats how LJ does it:

http://www.livejournal.com/manage/emailpost.bml?mode=help

OK I know that posting by email is probably less of a "feature" now than it used to be due to rich clients but the WP client on my Android G1 sucks and email posting where I can put in tags and categories would be much easier ;-)

Postie says that'll do categories but, again, I haven't tried it:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/other_notes/

But it still seems to go out to an external email service to fetch mail which might be fine for a single WP install but surely a good post by email would read messages directly from the mail file on the local server. That's how I did it when I wrote some code to allow people to update a specific page on a Wiki by sending in formatted emails to a special address

"But it still..." meaning postie or wpmu?

When you say an "external email service", are you saying that even if you;re making a local call to the email server on the same box? That's usually how things work with servers when you email yourself. An actual connection is made as if it was an outside server. The reason being to prevent relaying out of the box which is a common spammer trick.

I meant postie and possibly WPMU given from what I've seen of its post by email configuration

I would have thought that any post by email system on WPMU should be totally integrated. Where all the end user ever needs to do is provide the email address of the sender and that the WPMU install offers, like LJ does, the email address which the user posts to, and that from the WPMU admin side the admin person only needs to set one email domain for all incoming email (be that an email server hosted on the same server or on a separate box)

It is integrated but for the site admin. You could probably create a page that allows end users to add in an email address but that still requires site admin intervention. Do remember that not every body runs the same platform and creating an email inbox for a server is different depending on the OS. It's the same story as automated domain mapping via Donncha;s plugin. I run Direct Admin boxes. James and Andrew run CPanel boxes. Andrea and Ron runs every linux under the sun. What works for me won't work for others.

edit: To get around the different setups, it's a POP3 call. That's pretty much standard with mail formats and different servers. You just have to set it up manually.

Anyone seen this:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/post-by-email/