wayne on September 17, 2008 

Blogger.com's email settings tab allows you, the blog owner, to do something really terrific.  With the settings found on this tab, you can post to your blog via email and also have your posts sent to a list of email addresses whenever a new post is posted.  This can be beneficial to Blogger.com users in many ways.

Note to new visitors!  If you would like to know more about this series or view all available lessons, just follow the appropriate link.

Use Your Email to Blog

I never really gave it much thought, but using your email client to blog can be, perhaps, a bit better than the interface provided by Blogger.  At a minimum, it would be a great way to capture ideas for posts as they happen in your head.

How many times have you had a great idea for a post and then just let it slide by, or forget to write it down?  I've done this many, many times.  Sometimes I'll write it down, other times I'll create a draft post and come back to it later.  Now that I've discovered this feature, I think I'll simply send an email to my blog and have Blogger put the post into draft mode.

Mail-to-Blogger Address

The Mail-to-Blogger Address is where you create the email address that you can send your emails to.  Simply enter something into the textbox provided and click save.  You can immediately start using this feature.

There are also two options below the email field that specify if posts sent via email are published automatically or if they enter draft mode first.  If you specify 'Save emails as draft posts' then you have the perfect solution to help capture those ideas as they happen.  Of course, I'm assuming you have access to email throughout the day like I do. 

I already sent one post through this mechanism and it seems to work beautifully.  One thing I might mention is to start out with tests.  I added a link into my email and the formatting was sparse.  What would happen if I tried to inject a video, or a picture into the email?  How would blogger handle that?

I would imagine that most email clients don't provide the ability to float objects to the left or right, causing your post to look less than desirable (If you are anal retentive like myself).  If you are only posting text and links, you are good to go, but any pictures, videos or other objects will probably need a little more love on the Blogger Edit Post side of life.

BlogSend Address

The BlogSend control allows you to have published posts sent to the email addresses that you enter into this control.  This does not include drafts, only published posts.

I will venture that the best use of this comes when you have multiple authors on a site.  One author posts, the others also get the post in email.  It's more immediate that an RSS feed, and more personal since it goes directly to the emails you specify here.

That's It!

There isn't much on this administration screen by way of controls, but these two items are quite powerful and provide you some really good tools to help you work your blog.

Do you send emails to your blog?  If so, how has it worked out for you?  Do you have a work-flow that you follow that includes emailing to your blog?

Is anyone going to start using this feature now that you know about it?  Let us know!

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