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[request] Blog by Email
Just like a lot of other people I’d love to see a feature such as blogging by email. Unfortunately I have not very much time on my hands right now, so I don’t think I could code a plug-in in the foreseeable future. However, I have it all planned in my head already and would like your feedback on my thoughts.
Since wordpress is licensed under the GPL as well, plus it can handle blog by mail, it should be relatively painless to integrate the wp-mail.php code into a plug-in. It appears to build on a class developed by Squirrel Mail. There is only one problem left for most average users: How is it possible to regularily check the pop3 account if you cannot use cron-jobs? Then I came to a conclusion that will most likely only work with low-traffic sites, but then again this is what most users without a cron-job will have anyway.
Imagine this blog-by-mail plug-in requires a tag inside the index page:
<txp:bbm server=“pop3.server” login=“login” pass=“pass” intervall=“30” />
Now, when the site is requested this plug-in will write a timestamp into the database and check for new email. If there is new email, it will convert it to a blog post and delete the mail. The next time somebody requests index.php it will check the database for the last mailcheck. Let’s assume this is 5 minutes ago. Then it will not initiate the pop3 connection. After another 20 minutes somebody requests the index.php again. Now the last mailcheck was more than 15 minutes ago, so the plug-in checks for mail once again. If it finds a new mail, it will get blogged. Maybe you could even use the log-information instead of creating your own storage space for the timestamp.
So the whole configuration could either be a well developed admin-backend or attributes to the tag. The latter would be a very rudimentary solution but nevertheless a solution. The intervall could be set to anything you like, minutes, hours, days, you name it.
I think many people would find such a plug-in extremely valuable and might even be tempted to pay for it (I know I would).
In a second or third version the plug-in could strap some signatures from the incoming mail or do all kinds of funky stuff.
Whadda ya think? This just occured to me on a business trip the other day when I tinkered with my new Blackberry, so that probably explains a lot ;)
Yoko for Textpattern – A free blog theme • Minimum Theme – If all you want to do is write.
Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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Re: [request] Blog by Email
I didn’t check the wp plugin you mention… but I see another problem lurking in there… how would you “authenticate” postings by mail?
For one thing, this is easily abusable by spammers, OTOH, it is can also be easily abused by ‘’‘anyone’‘’, as long as he/she can find out from which address someone is posting… this should need some kind of 3-way auth… but if we can’t trigger events on mail arrival (or controlled by cron), this is gonna be hard…
Mariano Absatz – El Baby
I don’t suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
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Re: [request] Blog by Email
Wordpress has blog-by-mail included in the “core”, it works out of the box. The only way to make certain the post is authentic and the author has the right to post its content to the blog is by using a secret email address. You could, of course, try to use gpg or some other coding mechanism, but if you have functionality as sophisticated as this you will definitely have the ability to run cron jobs as well :)
In order to add something productive, you might want to use some kind of challenging routine that might send you an email back to the predefined address, asking to verify that previous posting. If oyu can send mails you can probably also receive them. Or you could add a mandatory “password” to the subject or body of the textmessage.
Yoko for Textpattern – A free blog theme • Minimum Theme – If all you want to do is write.
Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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Re: [request] Blog by Email
stephan wrote:
…you might want to use some kind of challenging routine that might send you an email back to the predefined address, asking to verify that previous posting.
This is what I wanted to mean by 3-way auth, however, I still have to be able to somehow read the messages… I’ll think about it…
Mariano Absatz – El Baby
I don’t suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
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Re: [request] Blog by Email
Hi baby,
did you get a chance to think about it? :-)
Yoko for Textpattern – A free blog theme • Minimum Theme – If all you want to do is write.
Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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#6 2006-11-04 20:30:25
- TheEric
- Plugin Author
- From: Wyoming
- Registered: 2004-09-17
- Posts: 566
Re: [request] Blog by Email
I was working on this about a year ago and never got the urge to continue. If anyone wants to take up where I left off, I have the beginnings of the basic class file here
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