Oldstone Place

I’ve been keeping notes while setting up Wordpress on my PC at home. What I really want is to be able to moblog - post articles from my phone. Its been difficult, but it looks like its just about starting to work. The hard part is getting the Postie mail plugin to work with Wordpress v2.0.

Setup an Email Account
First you’ll need a new POP email account. Don’t use your usual email account because any mail you receive will be added to your blog, and you probably don’t want that. Many Internet Providers give away a couple of extra email accounts with their internet access services, or you can try a free webmail service like Gmail, just make sure that POP3 is turned on in the settings. Unfortunately Hotmail and Yahoo don’t allow POP access unless you subscribe to their advanced services, but if you have control of your webserver you can use a webmail client like MrPostman to act as a POP interface. When you’re making the account it’s a good idea to use a random account name to reduce the risk of spam.

Install Postie
Install the Postie plugin by downloading the file and copying the uncompressed files into the wp-content\plugins\postie folder on your server. Back in your Wordpress admin area, go to Plugins and activate the Postie plugin. Now under Options you will find a comprehensive Configure Postie section.
You should add you phones email address and any other emails you might want to post from, one per line, in the Authorized Addresses area.
Enter folder names for photos and files, say /wp-content/photos/ and /wp-content/uploads/ and make sure they exist on your server.
If you phone or mail server add signatures to mails, you can tell Postie to cut the signature before posting it. Add the pattern that starts the signature (usually a double dash –) in the Signature Patterns area. For example when AVG scans incoming mails for viruses it adds an unwanted “Scanned by AVG” message to each mail. Adding — to Signature Patterns will remove this message from your posts.
There are configuration settings for attached images and 3GP videos if you will be posting them from your phone. In most cases the default settings should work.
If you are posting from a different timezone than your server, you can set Postie Time Correction to get the correct timestamp on your posts.
Make sure your mail server and mail account settings are entered correctly then click Update Options.

Configure Wordpress
Once you have Postie installed and a POP mail account set up and tested, configure Wordpress. Open www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin then under Options > Writing you’ll find a Writing by E-mail section. Fill in your mailserver address which can be a domain name like mail.domain.com or the IP address of your server if you’re sure it will never ever change.
Set the port to 110 for a default POP server, or 11110 if you’re using MrPostman, or enter “localhost” if your mail server runs on your webserver.
Enter your mail account username and password and select a default category for your moblogging posts to go in.

• Mailserver: 192.168.11.30
• Port: 110
• Login name: mymoblog3333@example.com
• Password: xxxxx
• Default category: Moblog

Testing
Click Test Config to check for inconsistencies in your configuration.
If all looks ok, then try sending a post from your phone to the special email address you set up.
When the mail has been sent, click the Run Postie button. Postie will check your email account for new mails and add them to your blog.

Automation
Instead of having to click Run Postie every time you want your mailbox scanned, you can set it to scan at regular intervals.
One way is to set a cron job or scheduler to run lynx or even php to open http://yourwebsite/yourblog/wp_mail.php once every couple of minutes.
An easier way is to use the cronless Postie plugin included in the Postie package.

Bugs
I had a few problems using the older version of Postie with Wordpress 2.0. See this post for fixes and new versions.