For me, a handy bit of functionality I needed for my Idno powered personal lifestream site, is the ability to make posts via email.

Idno has a powerful mobile view, but sometimes even that is too bandwidth intensive, and quite often I like to be able to fire and forget; use the native apps on my phone or laptop that better handle disconnection.

So, I put together a quick plugin that allows you to make posts via email!

How it works

The plugin, once installed and configured, will let you generate a secret email address to which you send your email.

Out of the box the plugin will allow you to make status updates, long form posts (where the length of the subject and message body exceeds 140 characters), and even upload photos, and you can extend it further in your own plugins!

Installation

Installation requires you to have access to your own mail server (which if you’re a good indieweb / prism-breaking citizen you should be). You create an email alias that will pipe the email through a incoming email script, and then configure your email server to direct email to this handler for your domain.

The repository readme has some more detailed instruction (and of course there are many other techniques for firing email through the script).

» Visit the project on Github…

7 thoughts on “Making an Idno post via email

  1. Just a quick post to bring you an update on the email posting support for Idno.
    The email posting plugin is a handy plugin that allows you to make posts to your Idno site via email. Unfortunately, since the way POSSE syndication buttons worked was changed a little while ago, it hasn’t been possible to post out to your silo followers in twitter/facebook/etc.
    No longer! Now, you are able to specify a syndication destination by putting one or more pipe tags in the email subject line (these will be removed from the post). So, for example to post to twitter, you’d use the “|” (pipe) character before the service, and add a |twitter to the subject line.
    Have fun!
    » Visit the project on Github…

    Thanks for visiting! If you’re new here you might like to read a bit about me. You may also like to follow me on Twitter!

    (Psst… I am also available to hire! Find out more…)
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  2. One of the features I’d really like to have in Known, is the ability to schedule posts for a later date.
    Sometimes I do this via my post by email plugin combined with an email scheduling tool, and at some point I’ll actually get around to sending a pull request to schedule posts natively.
    In the meantime, I wrote a quick plugin which makes use of the Buffer service to create a post schedule for your a number of social networking accounts.
    When installed and configured, this plugin will give you a new “buffer” syndication channel which will act like a meta channel – posting to multiple social networking accounts configured according to your buffer schedule.
    Hope this is useful to some of you!
    » Visit the project on Github…

    Thanks for visiting! If you’re new here you might like to read a bit about me. You may also like to follow me on Twitter!

    (Psst… I am also available to hire! Find out more…)
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  3. Certainly would; it would be fairly straightforward to add support, but there are rather tight filesize limits on emails/MTAs which is probably why I didn’t add audio/video support in the first place.
    YMMV of course.

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