4 Ways to Post to WordPress by Email

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The ability to post to WordPress via email has been around for a long time. However, the surge in mobile technology has made posting by email more relevant than ever before, especially for people on the go.

Whether you run a news site or blog with daily updates, an eCommerce store, restaurant, or any kind of business really, composing and sending emails from a mobile device and posting these to WordPress by email is probably going to be much easier than doing it through your dashboard.

You may be surprised how easy it is to send posts by email to your site. Here are a few different options that will keep you publishing content on the go:

Postie offers many advanced features for posting to your blog via email, including the ability to assign categories by name, included pictures and videos, and automatically strip off signatures. When you set Postie to prefer HTML messages, you’ll be able to get inline images for your posts. URLs to Youtube or Vimeo videos within the body of your email will automatically be converted to embedded videos.

Many post-by-email plugins have come and gone but Postie seems to have become the go-to plugin for creating posts in WordPress from emails.

One option for posting by email is to install the Jetpack plugin on your site and download the WordPress Mobile App to your phone.

Jetpack’s post-by-email feature integrates seamlessly with the WordPress mobile app. Jetpack requires a unique email address to post to (not from). To enable the Post by Email feature, go to your site’s WP Admin > Jetpack > Settings > Writing > Publish posts by sending an email.

Once the app is installed and configured, just type an email on your standard mobile email app or an email client like Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail, send it to your unique address and Jetpack will publish it on your site.

Zapier is a powerful, easy-to-use, and really cool service that lets you connect hundreds of different software applications together to automate many time-consuming processes and save you truckloads of time and productive hours. The basic idea behind the way Zapier works is that you connect “this software” with “that software,” so that when “this happens” (called a ‘trigger’), “that happens” (called an ‘action’). Each connection you create is called a “Zap” and you can create Zaps between all the different kinds of software programs supported by Zapier.

Once you set up your Zapier account (you can start with a free trial and a free plan) and learn how to use the service (there are plenty of tutorials online), you can easily integrate your favorite email client with WordPress.

For example, you can connect your Gmail account to your WordPress site and make a “Zap” (i.e. a connection) so that creating a new email in Gmail creates a post in WordPress.

Or, if you prefer to use Microsoft Outlook instead, you can create a “Zap” that will convert an email sent from your Outlook account into a WordPress post.

There are a number of other email integrations you can make to set up your post by email process with Zapier.

Tip: If you need to extract certain types of data from your emails to integrate with other applications, take a look at Zapier’s Email Parser tool.

Email Parser lets you send data through Zapier that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. It takes bits and pieces from an email so that you can use it in a Zap.

Experiment with Zapier and you will discover many other ways to automate your processes. As Ronnie Burt, our Chief Business Officer says, “Zapier – it’s quirky, but it works!” 

WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you set up posting via emails but the function is now deprecated and will be removed in some future releases. The WordPress Codex has a tutorial called “Post to your blog using email” that outlines the steps it takes to set up email posting. If you go to Dashboard > Settings > Writing, you’ll find instructions for setting up an email account with POP3 access for WordPress to use in posting.

We recommend avoiding the built-in post-by-email feature of WordPress as it could soon be removed altogether. Even WordPress itself recommends using a plugin to create WordPress posts from emails.

Instead, we recommend downloading the Postie plugin and using it to set up posts by email. Alternatively, you can use either the WordPress Mobile App with Jetpack’s post-by-email feature or learn how to use Zapier and create a Zap that will automate this process for you. All of these options will keep you posting content to your WordPress site on the go.