blogging via iphone = win

December 18, 2008 10:59 AM

I need an alternative to Gmail that does pop3 without SSL, and won't expire after so many days of inactivity.

I'm trying to set up my wordpress install to do posts-by-email. To do this, I need to set up an email account that only myself and my co-blogger know about. Wordpress allows support for this and will access a POP3 account for you and post contents, but it doesn't currently support SSL, so a new gmail account is a no-go.

Any suggestions for a webmail provider that will do POP3 without SSL, will stay up reliably, and won't expire if we don't log in for such an amount of time? (I guess expiration after a couple of years would be OK, but Fastmail's 45 days is a little short). Things like ads and interface don't really matter since we ideally won't be checking it, but the provider can't be selling the address to spammers or sending us service updates either.

There's some workarounds with old wordpress plugins, but I'd like to not have to worry about getting them to work and updating them. Also, I'm not really interested in setting up my own email server or using my ISP.

posted by almostmanda to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Don't understand why 45 days is too short -- if you're going to do post-by-mail, surely Wordpress will be logging in at least daily?
posted by kindall at 11:38 AM on December 18, 2008

There's a WordPress for iPhone app.
posted by sinfony at 11:50 AM on December 18, 2008

Self-hosted Wordpress, or Wordpress.com?

The iPhone app should help with both.

If you are self hosted, it looks like there are a few options:
If PHP has SSL support built in, you may be able to connect to ssl:// pop.gmail.com as your server name.

Their is also a plugin called Postie that enhances the mail to Wordpress functionality that is supposed to support SSL, but it looks like it hasn't been kept up to date, and it may well require PHP have SSL support compiled in too.
posted by Good Brain at 12:52 PM on December 18, 2008

Self-hosted wordpress.

We don't want to do all of our blogging via iPhone, we just want the option there. I don't want iPhone apps--I want to be able to do this via email so we can both do it from any workstation (iPhone included) with no set-up. In hindsight, I probably should not have mentioned the iPhone at all, since this is not really what I am asking about.
posted by almostmanda at 1:21 PM on December 18, 2008

I don't mean to be reductive, but if you're at a workstation with internet access, why not just use the WordPress web interface?
posted by sinfony at 1:53 PM on December 18, 2008

kindall makes a good point - it's important to understand that each time your WordPress installation checks for new messages on the POP3 server, it will count as a "log in" for Fastmail's purposes whether there are new messages or not. Your WordPress installation will most likely be logging in to check for new messages many times a day so it can post them to the blog as they come in.

From this page on the Fastmail site:

After 45 days no login ... Number of days of inactivity before the account is automatically closed and all content is deleted. Logging in through the web, POP, IMAP, or SMTP causes the counter to reset.

So you never actually need to log in to the webmail service at all, as long as WordPress keeps checking the mailbox via POP3.
posted by contraption at 2:16 PM on December 18, 2008

If you're self-hosted, then even if your PHP doesn't have SSL support and you don't want to mess with it, it should be pretty easy to set up a daemon on your own box that accepts Wordpress's unencrypted POP3 connections and relays them to Gmail's POP server via SSL. Here's a recipe I posted recently for how to build a simple local proxy for Gmail's SMTP server. The same technique should work for any SSL-connected service for which you need an unencrypted local connection.
posted by flabdablet at 3:13 PM on December 18, 2008