I was looking into blogging via email¹, and I couldn’t get it to work. Until I discovered that WordPress has to be told to check for any new emails.².

In order to process the email post, WordPress uses wp-mail.php. Loading this page in your browser will tell WordPress to check for new email posts. There are three ways to call the file:

• By visiting the URI to wp-mail.php in your browser,
• By using Cron to automatically load the file after a set period of time, or
• By including a hidden iframe in your Blog footer that links to wp-mail.php.

Not all WordPress users have the ability to edit their crontab and even more have no interest in editing their theme files. So I wrote a simple plugin that will add the iframe to the the blog footer.

When I say simple, I actually mean simple – there’s all of 3 lines of code in this plugin, so not much can go wrong with it.³

You can read more about it here.

1. The reason for which I’ll go into in a later post [↩]
2. I should of realised this, but it was so obvious that I didn’t even consider it [↩]
3. Having just re-read that, it looks like I’m tempting fate. [↩]