E-mail autoposting is a quick and easy way to create new posts on your blog. Image: Wikimedia Commons

E-mail auto-posting, or e-mail syndication, is a service that sends complete articles directly to your blog, and they appear in the dashboard for you to edit and post as you wish. Some content services offer this as a way to syndicate previously published articles, while others use it as a way to provide completely unique, fresh content for your blog only. You can also use post-by-email to update your blog without having to ever log into WordPress, once it is set up.

Built-in WordPress post-via-e-mail

WordPress has a built-in system that will let you post to your WordPress blog via e-mail. That system, however, does not necessarily accept HTML or have built-in functionality that may prove useful. In order to get around this, we recommend that you use a plugin called Postie to get posts via e-mail.

Setting up your autoposting e-mail address

Before you set up Postie, you will need to create an e-mail address that you will use for nothing except receiving posts for your blog. We do not recommend using a free e-mail service to set up this address. Everything that is sent to that e-mail address will be posted to your blog, so you should not share this address with anyone except content syndication services. Instead, you should use an e-mail address attached to your domain address. When you purchased your web hosting, e-mail addresses were most likely included. Find out from your web host how to set up an e-mail address. You should create an address that is relatively random and difficult to guess – a combination of both numbers and letters.

You will need four pieces of information about your e-mail address to set up posting via e-mail. Write down this information while you are setting up your e-mail address:

• POP or POP3 mail server – this will either be mail.yourdomain.com or, if you are on shared hosting, it may be server.domain.com.
• Mail server username – this will either be address@domain.com or address+domain.com
• Mail server password – the password to access your e-mail address.
• Mail Protocol and Port – Most often, this will be POP or POP3, with port 110.

Installing Postie

• On the Postie website, click the “download” link, then “save file” in the download box. Remember where you save the .zip file – you will need it for later.
• Log into your WordPress admin panel. You should see a navigation menu in the left hand sidebar.
• Click on “Plugins” in the left hand sidebar to open up more menu items.
• Click on “Add New.”
• Chose “upload” in the list of options.
• Click “browse” and find the .zip file on your computer.
• Click “install now.” WordPress will inform you when installation is complete.
• Go to your “Plugins” menu and activate the plugin

Setting up the Postie plugin

Under your “settings” menu in WordPress, “Postie” should have been added to your list of options. Click that option. A screen with eight different options should appear.

• Under “mailserver”, enter the four pieces of information you wrote down while setting up your e-mail address.
• Under the “user” option, we recommend that you leave “allow anyone to post” at no. You should also choose “draft” as your post status, so you can review all the posts before they appear on your blog.
• Finally, under the “message” options, choose a default category and a set of tags you would like attached to every e-mailed post. You should also set the preferred text type to HTML, allow e-mails sent to your autoposting account to include a subject line and allow HTML in the subject and body.
• While the rest of the options allow you further customization, you do not have to change any of these settings for post-by-email to work.

Post by e-mail can be a powerful tool for keeping fresh content on your blog. The setup takes some time, but it will help increase your affiliate commissions in the future.