I'm sure this is probably a "me" issue and not a program issue, but hopefully someone can figure it out.
Is there any way to know if I put all the e-mail configuration stuff into the plugin correctly? Will it give me an error if it can't access the account I'm sending it to?
Also, the plugin instructions say to use an e-mail address that is given on the "write entry" page. But that address isn't an address I've set up, it's the address but with a number attached to it, what do I do with that number? It isn't part of the address I set up so anything I send won't go anywhere.
And my last issue (I'm just full of problems today apparently) is that in the install instructions it says to make sure I have an API password selected in MT (my understanding is that it should be under preferences under user) but there is no such field. Clearly I am doing something wrong or don't have an option selected somewhere that I need, but I'm having a heck of a time finding it.
Anyway, I appreciate any help and I'm feeling very embarrassed for acting so noobie-ish! I've been using MT for years and I feel horrid when I have problems with it that I can't figure out myself!
The only user that has an API password on any of my blogs is myself, but I am also the only one with admin privileges.
I also have the plugin installed and once I managed to get the perl modules installed properly it quit throwing errors into my activity log but is not posting anything. It looks as if it may be logging into my mail server, I haven't checked the logs but the emails are showing as having been viewed when I log into webmail.
I have as yet to find any kind of troubleshooting docs or anything else that might help us out.
OK, good to know I'm not the only one!
I think I've figured out the API thing at any rate. On a different forum someone said it's the same thing as a "web services" password that I do have. I'm not sure why it's called two different things! That seems to be needlessly confusing.
Has anyone been able to get PostOffice to work? I've set it up against a gmail account (which allows the plus-style addressing postoffice requires), but nothing seems to be happening. There is a test mail in the gmail account, from an allowed-to-post email address, but it's not fetching it. Gmail requires the SSL to be turned _on_, yes?
My service provider tells me that all the requisite modules are loaded and functioning.
Any ideas?
How are you trying to grab the mail? Might be a factor.
During my testing, I was never able to get PO to fetch from GMail via IMAP. I don't know whether this is a problem with IMAP transfer itself, though, or the combination of it with GMail as all my own accounts are hosted with them right now. (Also note, though to be fair my very limited understanding is that IMAP is more complex than POP and probably no server gets it perfectly.) PO calls upon Mail::IMAPClient for retrieval, and given it's been around since 2001 I'd guess it's probably been put through its paces by now, so I'm leaning toward it being a GMail issue, though that obviously still needs confirmation.
Fetching from GMail via POP was fine.
Plus addressing isn't necessarily required, by the way. Only if you have multiple blogs that would all be fetching from the same e-mail address. You can set up multiple addresses to avoid that if you want; it'd also seem more intuitive to me to mail photoblog@example.com, tumble@example.com, etc. rather than postoffice+2@example.com.
But if there's only the one blog anyway, just leave it off.
Thanks for the time Su, but maybe my bad. Would appreciate it if you have a minute for this:
I _am_ using PO with the Gmail POP3. What I entered was this:
1. Account to check: xyz@gmail.com
2. Type: POP3
3. Server: gmail.com (should it be pop.gmail.com?)
4. Require SSL? Check, yes
5. Account name: xyz@gmail.com
6. Password: XpwDxpWD
7. Use API Key in address off
8. Allow all authors to post off
9. Default status: draft
10. Default author: gautam
11. Authorised sender: myotheraccount@gmail.com
Sent a mail to xyz+1@gmail and also xyz@gmail.com from myotheraccount@gmail.com.
Nothing happened! I'm guessing it's one of two things
1. Either my settings are wrong; or
2. Some required module is missing ... but shouldn't that return an error when I try and set all these variables?
Thanks for the time Su, but maybe my bad. Would appreciate it if you have a minute for this:
I _am_ using PO with the Gmail POP3. What I entered was this:
1. Account to check: xyz@gmail.com
2. Type: POP3
3. Server: gmail.com (should it be pop.gmail.com?)
4. Require SSL? Check, yes
5. Account name: xyz@gmail.com
6. Password: XpwDxpWD
7. Use API Key in address off
8. Allow all authors to post off
9. Default status: draft
10. Default author: gautam
11. Authorised sender: myotheraccount@gmail.com
Sent a mail to xyz+1@gmail and also xyz@gmail.com from myotheraccount@gmail.com.
Nothing happened! I'm guessing it's one of two things
1. Either my settings are wrong; or
2. Some required module is missing ... but shouldn't that return an error when I try and set all these variables?
eek! how did that get there twice? Sorry!
@Su:
Okay, got it going. Posts correctly.
Question: Do you by any chance know how to assign a post sent by email to a category?
Thanks.
Hi Gautam, you mentioned above that you got PO to work. Could you share what you did? Greatly appreciated.
R
What's the frequency of checking? I see it is set to 1. Does that mean ever minute or every second?
@Su: consolidating some questions (and answers)
1. It assigns a category from the subject line, if the category is placed in []. So:[mycat] My subject line, will assign it to category:mycat (does this have to exist? Can a default category be specified?) It doesn't however strip the [mycat] from the post _title_, so your post title is the **full** subject line, including [mycat]. Is this correct?
2. It doesn't seem to handle HTML formatted mail--formatting is lost. Is this to do with the default text-formatting set for that blog?
3. Attachments to HTML formatted mail show up; but the body text is stripped, leaving only the attachment.
4. Frequency=1 seems to mean every 15 minutes. Is this correct? Or is this to do with my periodic-tasks.pl frequency? The documentation doesn't say anything about setting up the cron job for periodic tasks.
5. For some reason, it seems not to deliver mails from alternative addresses.
6. Is there any way to get it to upload the images to a default folder rather than the site root?
In practical terms, this means that mail will be checked at the frequency of your run-periodic-tasks cron job. I'm not sure how that works out if you happen to be running it in daemon mode, but would guess the end result is pretty much immediate. The included documentation doesn't say very much at all right now. Use mine instead.
As far as a "right now" option? You'd have to hack PostOffice.pm. Probably wouldn't take much, though the change would apply to all blogs(relative to that blog's dir) unless you went further and hard-coded some blog_id checking or somesuch. This is definite feature request material, though eg. add blog-level option to specify filepath.
Muchos gracias, Su. Noted your documentation link--very handy, lot of effort there, much appreciated!
Now, thanks to Markdown ...
1. noted; only means I have to set it to post into draft and then manually publish after correcting the basename and the title; or leave the posts without categories and add those in later (better I think than tinkering with basenames).
2. ok
3. ok; 2 & 3 only mean I post in plain-text mode, which I prefer anyway.
4. ok, and thanks again for the doc link.
5. Weird thing here. Say I have three email ids: Email(1) is associated with my profile. No problem, can always post from that (ticking on "let all authors post" option). Additional email field I specified both Email(2) and Email(3), comma separated. Sent to the same catching box. Only posts from Email(2) worked. I reversed the order. It caught only those from Email(3). I tried separating with a line-feed. Same result. Total and complete nitpicking on my part. Why would I want to post from, at best, more than _two_ email ids anyway? Just that if it don't work, somebody ought to know, yes?
6. Unlcear about your last para, especially the "right now" option. What's that?
I put all the required perl modules in all the required places, but nothing happens - no errors, nothing. I'm using a gmail address, set to archive when pop is accessed, but there's no evidence on he gmail side that it has been accessed.
The cron job is working (it's publishing in the background, running scheduled tasks, etc.)
I'm stumped.
@thegreenpages, Cindi:
Here's the set up, once you have it installed and showing up as a plugin. These are the config details:
1. Account to check: xyz@gmail.com
2. Type: POP3
3. Server: **pop**.gmail.com (should it be pop.gmail.com?)
4. Require SSL? **Check, yes**
5. Account name: xyz@gmail.com
6. Password: XpwDxpWD
7. Use API Key in address off
8. Allow all authors to post off
9. Default status: draft
10. Default author: YourName
11. Authorised sender: myotheraccount@gmail.com
That's all I did and it worked.
1. Destination Inbox: user@gmail.com
2. Type: POP3
3. Server: pop.gmail.com
4. Require SSL: checked
5. email account username: user@gmail.com (Same as #1)
6. Password: herpassword
7. Default Post Status: Published
8. Email addresses allowed to post: user_we_mail_from@gmail.com
9. Allow all authors: unchecked
10: Require API key: unchecked
11: Default Author: her_main_user
It doesn't seem to ever get email and post it. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I don't see any errors. Do I need to do something to make it realize it needs to check every so often?
Wow, this plugin is just PATHETIC.
Where to start?
How about with the setup:
This plugin does NOT check the email account via IMAP or POP by default. This is not mentioned in the README at all. In order for this plugin to actually check for messages it needs to be triggered to run. This is expected to be done by a cron job (a script on the server that is set to run at regularly scheduled times - for those who do not know). Mentioning this is the README would be nice. You see, if your hosting provider has setup moveable type for you, than you would have no idea that they have setup a cron job to run already. The cron that is expected to be setup is talked about here:
http://www.learningmovabletype.com/a/000757scheduled_posts
see the section on Using Shell Access. Geez.
Before you setup the cron job, you can run the command manually on the command line to check the output and see if the script is actually working:
cd /tools
./run-periodic-tasks
But once its "working" there are major problems:
Posting from Gmail is a joke. Rich Text emails (the default of gmail) get reformatted into big blobs of text. All breaks are discarded. Plain Text gmails - same story. This makes this plugin unusable!
Attachments do not appear when they are present in the message. They are added to the Assets of the blog, but are not shown in the blog post after the email is retrieved.
Posting via user@example.com does not work at all. user+2@example.com is required. WHAT?!? Normal everyday users are supposed to know that the 2 is the blog_id number by what magic? Many email servers also simply refuse that email format as well. Crazy. How about allowing the user to put that info at the top of their post:
Category: stuff
Whats so hard about that?
Finally, the "Email addresses allowed to post" parameter is completely ignored if the "Allow all MT authors from this blog to post" is left unchecked.
MT, this is just sad. The #1 feature requested as soon as a blog is made available is "can I post to it from my email?". And for now the answer is no. Put a dev on this!
After placing all the PERL modules into the proper folder (plugins/PostOffice/lib/) things started to work. I set up a cron job as well to run run-periodic-tasks.
However there are two problems.
1) It posts the email / entry every time the cron job runs (it doesn't appear to be flagging the messages as "read").
2) When it posts the entry, it doesn't rebuild the blog, so the entries don't show up on the main index page.