Telligent, the hyper-caffeinated people behind Community Server, have just released their latest online service, blogmailr.  This service allows you to post to your blog via email.

Leading up to the unveiling, the Telligenti have been a bit coy about keeping this product shrouded in secrecy.  But with a name like blogmailr, removing the last “e” isn’t quite obfuscating enough to prevent anyone from guessing. ;)

We’ve been working on a mail-to-weblog feature for Subtext, but if you can’t wait for that, you can always give blogmailr a try.  I gave it a quick try and it does indeed work with Subtext. One nice feature of the service is that they support Really Simple Discovery (RSD), popularized by Windows Live Writer, so it is easy to configure.

If you are a fanatic about clean valid semantic markup, you should consider sending your email using plain text.  All the markup gunk that Outlook puts in for rich text emails will make your validator’s head spin.  After posting this very blog post with BlogMailr, I went in and cleaned up the markup.  I’m just anal that way.

If this service takes off, beware of spammers attempting to email random blocks of *@blogmailr.com email addresses.  That would be a particularly effective SPAM attack if they were able to post to your blog via email.

Fortunately, the service generates a random email address used to post to your blog.  It also allows you to specify which email addresses it will accept as a from address.  So a spammer would have to spoof your allowed address and guess your blogmailr address.  Not easily accomplished.

One downside of this approach is it may be difficult for users to remember the generated blogmailr email address. 

Published with BlogMailr