mail2Post: How to update your blog by email, instead of using Blogger

Blogger's mail2Post tool lets authors make blog-posts, without using the Blogger software. All you need to do is set it up, and write posts using your regular email tools.

Mail2Post and Blogger

The mail2Post feature, sometimes known as Post-to-profile, is a way of putting content on your blog without using the full Blogger software for writing the post.

It's not quite as good as using Blogger itself - there are a few features missing - but it is good enough in many situations.

How to set up mail2Post

Log in to Blogger with the Google account that you want to have mail2Post rights to your blog: this account needs to already be set up as an author for the the blog.

Go to

The Settings tab - if you are logged on with an author account, or
The Settings > Email tab if you are using an administrator account

Beside Posting using email, there is a place where you can enter some "secretWords", to make up an email address that you can use to post to your blog.

Enter some suitable words: make sure it's not too easy to guess (your surname would not be a good choice!), so that spammers cannot get into it:

Choose either to publish emailed updates as soon as they arrive, or to save email as drafts so that you, or another administrator, can review them before posting.

Note down the full email address, ie NAME.your-secret-words@blogger.com (you will need this later - and unfortunately because of the way it's displayed, it is not easy to copy-and-paste the value).

Click Save Settings.

Job Done! Your blog is now set up so that posts can be created by being emailed to it, instead of requiring someone to use the Blogger software to write each post.

Using the mail2Post address

Once mail2Post is set up, anyone who sends an email message to the email address you copied can post to your blog, with what ever restrictions you set.

You might put message on your blog saying

"send contributions to YOURNAME.YOURSECRETWORDS@blogger.com"

But be aware that this could generate a lot of spam. And in the worse case, the spam could get your blog deleted for breaking Blogger's terms and conditions.

Alternatively, you might just tell the address to selected people - or perhaps even just use it yourself.

How is a Blogger Post made from an email message

When a message is sent to your mail2Post address:

The subject-line of your email message becomes the Post-title
The body of the email message becomes the body of the post
I think: If you automatically publish emailed posts, then the post date-and-time is the moment at which Blogger's servers received the incoming email message - expressed in Blogger's default time zone (PST OR PDT, I think).
No labels are applied to the post
The post-author is the profile name of the blog-author who set up the mail2Post address.

Pictures and Videos
People have reported various results when they include images and videos inside messages sent via mail2Post. Personally, I have tested:

An attached picture - posted ok, the image is show before all the text from the body of the email message
An attached video file (4meg) - posted ok with the video appearing to be above the text from the email message
An in-line photo - worked perfectly, the picture is placed in the post in the same position (relative to the text) that it was in the original email.

I suspect that the results depend on they type of picture, the email client you are using, and the message format settings. My testing was with Mozilla Thunderbird, which has a particular way of thinking about "attachments", slightly different from other email systems that I have used (eg Microsoft Outlook).

Probably the only way to discover how photos are handled when you use your email to send them is to set up a test-blog and experiment with different options.

What your readers see

People who read your blog in a web-browser see mail2Post entries just like any other posts. If your blog displays the poster's name, then mail2Post entries have the name of the blog-author who set up the mail2Post address.

As mentioned before, the positioning of pictures and videos may not always be as good: attached pictures, in particular, may be shown as the very stop of the post.

Apart from that, there is nothing to show visitors that the post was created using email - in either the post or in the blog's RSS feed.

Giving someone write access (ie author permissions) to your blog

Setting up a blog administrator

Understanding Google accounts

Setting up a test-blog to try things out in private

RSS, and why it matters for your blog