Installation

• Either:
  • Put the postie.zip file in wp-content/plugins/ and unzip it
• Or:
  • Use the automatic installer (WP 2.7+)
• Login to WordPress as an administrator
• Goto the Plugins tab in the WordPress Admin Site
• Activate "Postie"
• Goto to the "Settings" tab and click on the sub-tab "Postie" to configure it.
• Make sure you enter the mailserver information correctly, including the type of connection and the port number. Common port configurations:
  • pop3: 110
  • pop3-ssl: 995
  • imap: 143
  • imap-ssl: 993
• (Postie ignores the settings under Settings->Writing->Writing-by-Email)

Automating checking e-mail

By default, postie checks for new e-mail every 30 minutes. You can select from a number of different checking intervals in the settings page, under the mailserver tab.

If you would prefer to have more fine-grained control of how postie checks for mail, you can also set up a crontab. This is for advanced users only. If your site runs on a UNIX/linux server, and you have shell access, you can enable mail checking using cron; if you don't know anything about cron, skip to the cronless postie section.

Setup a cronjob to pull down the get_mail.php Examples:

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx --source http://blog.robfelty.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php >/dev/null 2>&1

This fetches the mail every five minutes with lynx

*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O /dev/null http://blog.robfelty.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php >/dev/null 2>&1

This fetches the mail every ten minutes with wget

Usage

• If you put in :start - the message processing won't start until it sees that string
• If you put in :end - the message processing will stop once it sees that string
• Posts can be delayed by adding a line with delayXdXhXm where X is a number.
  • delay:1d - 1 day
  • delay:1h - 1 hour
  • delay:1m - 1 minute
  • delay:1d2h4m - 1 day 2 hours 4m
• By putting comments:X in your message you can control if comments are allowed
  • comments:0 - means closed
  • comments:1 - means open
  • comments:2 - means registered only
• Replying to an e-mail gets posted as a comment.
  • For example, you e-mailed a post with the subject line "foo". If you then send an e-mail with the subject line "Re: foo", it will get posted as a comment to the "foo" post. This works by the subject line, so if you have two posts with titles "foo", then the comment will get placed in the more recent post.
• Custom excerpt
  • You can include a custom excerpt of an e-mail by putting it between :excerptstart and :excerptend
  • You can include images in the excerpt by using the shortcode #eimg1#, #eimg2# etc.

Category and tag handling

• If you put a category name in the subject with a : it will be used as the category for the post
• If you put a category id number in the subject with a : it will be used as the category for the post

• If you put the first part of a category name it will be posted in the first category that the system finds that matches - so if you put

  Subject: Gen: New News

  The system will post that in General.

• All of the above also applies if you put the category in brackets []

• Using [] or you can post to multiple categories at once

  Subject: [1] [Mo] [Br] My Subject

  On my blog it would post to General (Id 1), Moblog, and Brewing all at one time

• Using - or you can post to multiple categories at once

  Subject: -1- -Mo- -Br- My Subject

  On my blog it would post to General (Id 1), Moblog, and Brewing all at one time

• You can add tags by adding a line in the body of the message like so: tags: foo, bar
• You can also set a default tag to be applied if no tags are included.

Image Handling

• Allows you to attach images to your email and automatically post them to your blog
• You can publish images in the text of your message by using #img1# #img2# - each one will be replaced with the HTML for the image you attached

• Captions - you can also add a caption like so:

  • #img1 caption='foo'#
  • #img2 caption='bar'#

  Or, if you use IPTC captions, this caption will be used (adding a caption in many photo editing programs (for example Picasa), will add an IPTC caption)

• Image templates Postie now uses the default wordpress image template, but you can specify a different one if you wish.

  You can also specify a custom image template. I use the following custom template:

  <div class='imageframe alignleft'><a href='{IMAGE}'><img src="{THUMBNAIL}" alt="{CAPTION}" title="{CAPTION}" class="attachment" /></a><div class='imagecaption'>{CAPTION}</div></div>

  • {THUMBNAIL} gets replaced with the url to the thumbnail image
  • {MEDIUM} gets replaced with the url to the medium-sized image
  • {LARGE} gets replaced with the url to the large-sized image
  • {FULL} gets replaced with the url to the full-sized image
  • {FILENAME} gets replaced with the absolute path to the full-size image
  • {RELFILENAME} gets replaced with the relative path to the full-size image
  • {CAPTION} gets replaced with the caption you specified (if any)
  • {WIDTH} gets replaced with width of the photo
  • {HEIGHT} gets replaced with the height of the photo

Interoperability

• If your mail client doesn't support setting the subject (nokia) you can do so by putting #your title here# at the begining of your message
• POP3,POP3-SSL,IMAP,IMAP-SSL now supported - last three require php-imap support
• The program understands enough about mime to not duplicate post if you send an HTML and plain text message
• Automatically confirms that you are installed correctly