Email posting is a way to publish posts to your blog via email. any email client can be used to send the email, allowing you to post quickly and easily from devices such as mobile phones. Please note that you can only post to a blog using one email message at a time.
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generate a post by email address
Before you can post via email, you must generate a special email address. this address is unique to you and should be kept secret (anyone who knows the email address can publish a post on your blog).
- Go to your profile by clicking on your profile picture in the top right corner of wordpress.com.
- Click the manage blogs option in the left side menu.
- locate the blog you want to post to and click enable in the post by email column.
- you now have a special email address that you can use to email posts .
Plugin-Enabled Sites
- go to settings → write in the left sidebar of your site’s control panel.
- scroll down to the publishing tools section.
- do click the switch next to publish posts by sending an email .
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send emails
Once you have your post by email address, you can use it to publish posts to your site.
The subject of the email is used as the title of the post. the body is the content of the post. A few minutes after submitting your email, you should receive a notification email informing you of the published post details.
your email can be plain text or formatted. As much formatting as possible will be preserved, although the email publishing system will remove unnecessary html tags so your email will display correctly. Please note that you will need to use an email client that supports rich text or html formatting in order to use this feature. most email clients support this. you may need to switch your client to rich text or formatted mode.
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media and attachments
images and galleries
Attached images will be included in your post as follows:
- single images will be displayed inline (a single image is defined as an image without an image immediately following it).
- multiple images will be displayed as a gallery.
Multiple galleries and individual images are allowed in the same post. Please note that using the [nogallery] shortcode will disable all galleries.
You can also send attachments separately to: media+your_secret_email@post.wordpress.com. your attachments will simply be stored in your account without creating a new post; attachments will appear along with your other media.
payment features
If you have purchased a paid plan from wordpress.com, the following additional attachment types will be supported:
- supported audio files (mp3) will be displayed with the wordpress audio player.
- supported video files (mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg and m4v) will be will display with the wordpress video player, available on specific plans.
- all other files (doc, pdf, etc.) will display as links to the attached file.
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shortcodes
Special shortcodes can be embedded in your email to configure various aspects of the published post. supported shortcodes are:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...
- [slug your-post-slug]
- [post status | earring | draft | private]
- [password secret-password]
- [extract]some excerpt text[/extract]
- [category x,y,z]</ li
- [x,y,z tags]
- [delay +1 hour]
- [comments on | off]
- [nogallery] – disables the auto gallery and shows all images inline
- [ slideshow ] – (use without spaces) replaces the auto gallery with a slideshow slides</li
- [poll]Q&A[/poll]: Insert a crowdsignal poll into your post (details below)
- [advertise off | Twitter | facebook]
- [geotag on | off]: Override the geotagging privacy defaults to enable or disable the display of geographic information
- [more]: add one more tag
- [nextpage]: create pagination
- [end]: Everything following this shortcode (i.e. signatures) is ignored. make sure it’s on its own line with a blank line above it.
We provide more details on many of these shortcodes in the rest of this guide.
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provide a post title
The title of your post is usually taken from the subject line of your email. In some cases, such as when sending an email from some cell phones or through an mms-email gateway, you may not be able to provide a subject. in this case, you can set your post title directly inside the email:
[headline my fancy post]If you use both the email subject and the shortcode, the title specified in the shortcode will be used.
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change post status
Sometimes you may want to make your post private or have it reviewed by yourself or someone else at a later date before posting. To do this, you can use the [status] shortcode to set the post status.
[private status]↑ index ↑
category specification
the category shortcode will match the start of the category titles as well as the category ids. for example:
[category holidays, food, 1894]will match “holidays”, “food” and your site’s category with id 1894. Note that the categories must already exist on your blog and the spaces between the commas are not important.
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tag specification
Any number of tags can be added to your post, each separated by a comma within the shortcode.
[tag one potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, more]this will add four tags: “one potato”, “two potatoes”, “three potatoes” and “more”. Please note that your tags do not need to exist elsewhere on your blog and new tags will be created automatically.
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change your jetpack social settings
jetpack social allows you to notify other web services about your posts. with the shortcode [publicize] you can control this from emails.
- [post off] – disable all jetpack social notifications
- [post twitter] – send only one notification to twitter
- [post twitter]my new post [/ publicize]: just send a notification to twitter and set the twitter status to my new post
Please note that your jetpack’s social settings must have been previously configured.
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insert a crowdsignal poll
You must first have created or imported a crowdsignal account on wordpress.com before using this shortcode. once configured, you can embed a survey in an email as follows:
[survey]what is the worst movie of the decade?
* the love guru* fool’s gold
[/survey]Notice how the poll question is added after the [poll] shortcode. each response is on a new line and begins with an asterisk. the poll must end with [/poll].
You can configure your survey by adding additional details to the [survey] shortcode:
- type=”single | multi | 2 | 3″ – how many times a vote can be recorded (single by default)
- other=”yes | no” – allow an ‘other ‘ response (not default)
for example, to create a poll that allows up to three responses (including an “other” response):
[poll other=”yes” type=”3″]what is the worst movie of the decade?
* the love guru* fool’s gold
[/survey]↑ index ↑
delay your post
the delay shortcode will accept any time allowed by php’s strtotime. for example, you can:
[delay +1 hour] [delay +2 days]You can also schedule a post to post at a precise time, like in this example:
[delay 2013-12-01 11:30:00 EST]The above shortcode will schedule a post for December 1, 2013 at 11:30 AM. m Eastern Standard Time.
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geotagging
If your email includes an image that contains proper gps information (for example, as sent from an iphone), it will be used to geotag your post. the information will only be displayed to the public if you set up your blog to do so. you can override this via email using the [geotag on] and [geotag off] shortcodes.
Emails sent from a point gps device will be automatically geotagged.
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signatures
email publishing will automatically remove any email signature that matches the standard signature block pattern:
–
(that’s dash dash space)
will also remove anything after a <hr/> html and try to clean the cellular network signatures.
If your email system attaches a signature that doesn’t match any of these patterns, you can manually tell the email post to stop including text by adding the special shortcode [end] on its own line with a line blank above. anything after this will be removed from your post. If your cell phone network is adding a signature and you want us to remove it, please let us know the details and we’ll look into it.
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email example with shortcodes
The following email will be published in two days in the “wordpress” category, with the tags “announcement” and “wordpress”:
welcome to post via email, the easiest way to blog!
[tag ad, wordpress] [wordpress category] [delay +2 days]↑ index ↑
additional information
- if you want to add the address to your address book, you can download it as a vcard. click the vcard button in my blogs dashboard to save it to your device.
- the secret email address is per user account, not per blog. if you have a multi-user blog, each of your blog users can create their own post by email address, regardless of their user role.
- for users with the contributor user role, any Emailed post will be saved as pending , instead of posted. they will receive confirmation of their post with the post content in the email, but they will not receive a second email when their post is approved.
- clicking regenerate or regenerate address will give you a new email secret to use.