Mail-To-Blogger, And Problems From Mobile Blog Posting Volumes

Mobile blogging is becoming more and more popular - and it's creating an interesting challenge. Many blog owners, freed from the daily use of the home computer, are publishing multiple smaller posts, throughout the day - instead of a few larger posts, at the end of the day. Also, they are using mobile computers, and emailing or messaging the posts using Mail-To-Blogger, rather than composing the posts using the GUI Post Editor.

Lately, we're seeing more and more problem reports,in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.

Why are my posts not publishing?

Many of the people reporting problems are mobile bloggers, not understanding about the unavoidable limitations.

Mobile blogging, when used this way, presents two challenges.

1. The daily posting volume frequently exceeds anti-spam detection limits.
2. Use of a mobile computer, without the Blogger GUI Post Editor, prevents use of the anti-spam CAPTCHA, when necessitated by the posting volume.

The convenience of the mobile computer / smartphone motivates many blog owners to publish multiple small posts, throughout the day. The posting volume frequently makes a mobile blog owner look like a spammer, and the Blogger anti-spam mitigation becomes involved.

When exceeding daily post limits, and using Post Editor, the Blogger anti-spam mitigation will simply require solving of a CAPTCHA. This prevents spammers from flooding their blogs with multiple, spammy posts, by requiring all posts exceeding the daily limit to be published only after the CAPTCHA is solved. When the posts are submitted using Mail-To-Blogger, there is no opportunity to solve a CAPTCHA - and Mail-To-Blogger either saves those posts as Drafts, or simply drops them.

Generally, the missing posts can be found in the "Edit Posts" list (Classic Blogger GUI) or the "Posts" list (New Blogger GUI), in Draft status. The blog owner, at end of the day, simply must use a full featured computer, access the GUI wizard, and Publish all Draft posts.

If you are seeing this problem with your blog, do not consider the number "50", and the time span "24 hours", to be absolute standards. Depending upon where in the world you are located, the "24 hour" period may reset at some time which is not consistent with your personal 24 hour schedule. In some cases, 2 consecutive days, with less than 50 posts each day, may look like 1 day, to the anti-spam mitigation process.

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Keep Malicious Content Out Of Your Blog

Every day or so, we see reported from concerned bloggers, about unknown content in their blogs.

Where did those ads come from? I didn't add them!

or

How do I keep this other blogger from posting porn links in my blog?

As we add content to our blogs, and make them fun, interesting, and shiny, to attract readers, we risk adding undesirable content. This is a constant problem.

The bad guys are out there - and the more fun, interesting, and shiny your blog is, the more it's likely to have readership, reputation, and value.

The more readership, reputation, and value that your blog has, the more attractive it is to the bad guys. And the bad guys have various ways to attack a given blog.

• Malicious Comments
• Malicious Posts
• Malicious Accessories
• Malicious Blog Members
• BlogList / Feed Gadgets

Malicious Comments

One of the easiest way to add third party content to your blog is from allowing comments.

Comments are contributed by people who, at best, you simply do not know. Any content from someone who you do not know can always be malicious, or obnoxious in some way.

Some blog owners will try to identify and block individual commentors. I will continue to insist that anybody who you should fear will not be bothered greatly by anything that you can do here.

You absolutely must moderate comments, or risk having a blog known for hosting malicious links - or worse.

Malicious Posts

Besides comments, posts are a constant concern. If you have a team blog, you have to be able to trust the other members in the blog.

Post moderation, using post editor to publish, isn't an option. Anybody who you make an author can publish what they feel like publishing. You can only moderate posts after they are published, when using post editor.

An alternative to using post editor to publish is Mail-to-Blogger, where contributions are emailed to the blog. If Mail-to-Blogger is setup to publish straight to the blog, and the bad guys figure out your MTB account and password, you'll have malicious content a plenty.

You can moderate before publishing, using Mail-to-Blogger.

Malicious Accessories

Any time that you install third party accessories of any type, you are placing your blog at risk.

Don't be overly paranoid - you have to make your blog interesting to your readers. But do keep the risks in mind.

This is similar to layered security for your computer, which is a related concern here.

Malicious Blog Members

Sometimes, possibly having unwisely installed a third party accessory, the install process may have enabled the addition of an unknown member to the blog. The unwanted content may be added by the attacker, using this unknown blog member.

If none of the above advice offers you an explanation for the existence of unwanted content, check your blog member list.

BlogList / Feed Gadgets

Occasionally, we may Follow a blog where the owner will later decide to try to get more traffic to the blog, and will redirect the blog feed to a cloud of random blogs. If you are Following such a blog, or have such a blog in your BlogList or Feed gadget, you'll see your BlogList or Feed gadget show odd content - and frequent spam.

GMail Combined With Mail-to-Blogger

The Mail-to-Blogger feature of Blogger has intrigued me for a while. It's a neat way to get people to send email to your blog, and can even be used to have more than 100 named individuals publish to a private blog. But there are several limitations that have always bothered me.

• If you give a common MTB address out to everybody, and one misguided person abuses it, you have to change the MTB address, and pass out the new address to all but the abuser. And everybody has to change their email address for MTB.
• Explaining to everybody that they need to use a "blogger.com" email address, and worse, one of the form "xxxxxxxx.yyyyyy@blogger.com", is not user friendly.
• Of course, you can setup everybody as individual authors, go through the invite / accept membership process, and everybody can setup their own MTB address (and you get to hope that you can instruct everybody how to set that up without somebody making a mistake), but there's the 100 author limit again.

So let's add a component into the posting process - GMail.

• Setup a GMail account, and filtering rules for each person that you want emailing to your blog.
• Give everybody the GMail address ("whatever@gmail.com").
• If anybody offends you, setup a filter with their email address, to drop their posts into the trash.
• Forward the incoming email to the MTB address, using the GMail filter. Your blog authors never know about MTB, just "Send your posts to this email address.". Your blog authors never have to be disturbed if you filter one of them out. You can filter, given a moments notice.
• Since you can have multiple accounts with blog author membership, you could even have a pair of MTB accounts, one with ability to post drafts, the other with ability to post immediately to the blog. The former gives you post moderation ability. You can, selectively, forward email from some blog authors to post as Drafts; and email from others, whom you trust, can be forwarded to post immediately. And you can move specific authors from one group to the other, with no trouble.
• Manage your blog authors from GMail, and a much easier to use author list (the GMail filter list).

The one downside here is you'll have to pick a unique GMail address, and one that's easy for your blog authors to remember. But, you may be able to improve on that.

If your blog is published to a custom domain, you can setup and use an email address in the domain, which gives you complete control over the mailbox name (the "xxxxxxx" in "xxxxxxx@yourdomain.com"). GMail, again, is the interface for custom domain based email (aka Google Apps domains), and has the same filtering and forwarding ability.

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Mail-to-Blogger Is Too Simple

Mail-to-Blogger is so simple, some people don't see the forest for the trees. Occasionally, we see the anxious query

How do I post by email?

as if it's a complicated process.

But, it's not.

1. In Settings - Email, setup your MTB email address.
2. Write email. The Subject of the email becomes the post title, and the body of the email becomes the post content.
3. Send to your MTB email address.
4. You're done.

It's easier to do it, then to write about it - with one exception. If your primary blogging terminal is a cell phone, PDA, or a similar hand held computer, perform the above steps twice - first from a desktop or laptop with a tested email client, then from the cell phone / PDA. Don't test both email from your hand held computer, and Mail-to-Blogger, simultaneously - do structured testing.

And note limitations of Mail-to-Blogger.

1. You cannot add labels to posts, using Mail-to-Blogger.
2. You cannot add jump break - or any formatting change - using Mail-to-Blogger.
3. You cannot post HTML, using Mail-to-Blogger.
4. You can only make new posts, in Text mode, using Mail-to-Blogger.

Labels, jump break, other formatting tweaks, HTML, and editing of existing posts, can be done only using post editor, or the "Edit Posts" menu.

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Mail-to-Blogger - August 2008

Various bloggers in the Google Blogger Help forums are stating

None of my mail-to-blogger posts are making it to my blogs. And it is not till I actually go onto my blog and discover that all the emails I have done over the past 48 hours have not made it.

As of 11:00 8/22, there are no confirmed affinities to the problem. Some, but not all, complaints appear to relate to email from phone and PDAs - possibly because more people use MTB from phones and PDAs. And, the outage is not 100% - I personally have posted to my test blog, twice with no problem.

In my case, I initially tested yesterday, and got an immediate email bounce.

MTB Test 20080821-1

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    xxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.

I went to Settings - Email, then verified and Re Saved my settings. I sent MTB Test 20080821-2, which posted fine. And ditto for this morning with MTB Test 20080822-1.

Unfortunately, re Saving may not be a 100% effective solution.

>> (Update 8/22 11:45): We have an acknowledgment from Blogger Employee Gatsby

Thanks for the heads up on the Mail2Blogger issues; we'll investigate this and report back with an update soon.

>> Forum thread links: bX-*00082

>> Copy this tag: bX-*00082

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Mail-to-Blogger Can Provide Moderated Posting

Occasionally, someone asks

How can I require approval of any post before it's published?

and my typical answer will be

You can't, using the post editor. Any author can publish a post, and you can only moderate posts after the fact.

The key words there are "post editor".

If you enable Mail-to-Blogger in Settings - Mobile and email, you can have your authors email their posts, unpublished, to you.

You use the Mail-to-Blogger setting, and you publish posts when you approve.

If you set Mail-to-Blogger to save emails as draft posts, all posts emailed will be saved for you to moderate.

In the dashboard Settings - Email page, set "Posting using email" to "Save emails as draft post".

You, or any administrator, can examine draft posts from the Edit Posts menu - and publish only the ones that meet your approval.

Combine GMail and Mail-to-Blogger lets you automate your tasks.

If you use a GMail account to filter and forward to MTB, you can selectively route posts from specific individuals for moderating, and others can post directly.

This allows you to use your time more effectively, only moderate possible problem authors, moderate more effectively, and respond more promptly. If you can respond more promptly, you can selectively moderate based upon need, not just current workload.

Maintain some students as trusted - and keep a close watch on the others.

You can change individual author moderation policy on a moments notice.

Setup 2 Blogger accounts for your blog, each with a different MTB policy (Account A to post after moderation, Account B to post without moderation). Have your authors email their posts to a special GMail account.

Setup the GMail account with a series of email filters, with each author email forwarding to the appropriate Blogger account MTB email address.

Any individual author can be selectively changed between moderation and no moderation, by simply changing the email filter to redirect to Account A or Account B, respectively. You spend your time moderating only authors posting through Account A.

You can publish the posts under the student names, using multiple Blogger accounts.

If you want to publish the posts under the individual author names and profiles, setup individual Blogger accounts, as blog authors - one for each author - and only give the authors the Mail-to-Blogger email addresses. Then, as above, setup each Blogger account to save emails as draft posts.

Since you will be the actual owner of each Blogger account, setup the accounts with secure names and passwords - and keep track of the account names and passwords. Then, moderate the ones who need your attention.

Just observe that posts composed and submitted, using email, won't be as complete and well formatted, as posts composed in post editor. You may have to add content and formatting, before publishing.

Mail-to-Blogger Can Provide Anonymous Ability To Post

In the forums, we see periodically the query

How do I let everyone in my company post to my blog, without requiring them to register?

and my answer is typically

You can let them post comments, but to post actual articles, they will have to register.

And as we have learned, there is a limit in the number of registrations - each blog can have up to 100 members - administrators, authors, and readers - and no more. Apparently, up to 100 people can post to any blog, and no more.

That's not completely true. To use the Blogger Post Editor, through your browser, to post articles, you have to be a registered blog member. But, if you setup a Mail-to-Blogger account, and give out the Mail-to-Blogger email address, anyone knowing the address can post using their email program. Although here, you can moderate any posts, before publishing, should you feel the need.

This solution will have 2 caveats.

1. You are now opening the blog to anyone who knows the email address. Don't use an easy to guess private address component. And, establish a back door, for distribution of an updated private address component, when you do this. Plan to change the address periodically, and upon quick notice.
2. This will require that everybody posting use email. They won't be using the post editor. The people using this will have to check their email Inboxes after posting, and look for "undeliverable" notices caused by unexpected changes in the address (caveat #1).

Maybe this procedure will be more useful if you request your anonymous readers post a comment to a specified blog post, you moderate comments, and you can post their articles under your name.

This is not an excellent solution, but until Blogger extends the 100 members limit, maybe it's better than nothing.

Just note that posts composed and submitted, using email, won't be as complete and well formatted, as posts composed in post editor. You may have to add content and formatting, when publishing.

Mail-to-Blogger Author Settings

Recently, we noted the ability of blog Authors to setup their own Mail-to-Blogger access code to a given blog.

As a blog Author (aka "Guest" member), you will note a new Setting tab - "Email", where you now have the ability to setup your own Mail-to-Blogger address - with the public portion of the address set as your normal MTB public address. This is the same feature, that you may have enjoyed on your own blog, as an administrator / owner.

Presumably, you set the private portion of the address to a unique value, which then routes any MTB posts using the "public.private@blogger.com" (aka "account.password@blogger.com") email address to this blog.
We can now post to our blogs, and use MTB with Author identified, instead of anonymous (or name of the blog owner only). Remember, you can change only the "password" (private) portion of the address. The "account" (public) portion is set as a function of your Blogger account, and can't be changed.

Blog administrators have always had this setting, now blog authors have it too. It's right there, in Settings - "Mobile and email", under "Email" - "Posting using email". You can only change the "private" portion of the MTB email address ("secretWords"), then you simply email your posts using "public.private@blogger.com", where the combination of "public.private" is unique for every blog that uses MTB for posting.


This should give us a nice way around the Blogger limit of 100 blog members. Multiple Authors can share a single MTB address (maintained by the administrator), if the blog Member list exceeds 100 entries. Or, with all blog members having their own unique MTB address, everybody can post and be identified.



How you maintain an array of different MTB private addresses, given that you might use MTB for multiple blogs, will be another subject to be addressed.