We pushed Postmatic 1.2 out the door a few days ago. Releases have been happening on a weekly basis since launch so if you haven’t updated in a while you certainly want to. New features and a change log can always be found in the plugin itself.

Version 1.2 was primarily a bug fix but it did include one new feature worth talking about here: The ability to set the engage in this conversation via email checkbox on your comment form to be enabled by default:

What’s the big deal?

The default behavior in Postmatic is to have that checkbox turned off. If a user wants to engage via email they have to check the box, then they are subscribed. This is the best practice for anything on the web which is email related.

We’ve had a lot of requests to turn this on its head. To make the box checked by default, thereby making it easier for people to subscribe to the comments via email as well as increasing engagement overall. For some sites it makes sense – folks that are using us to power community forums or discussion board for example. As of version 1.2 there is a setting in Settings > Postmatic that will let you set this behavior.

Make sure you are legal

This innocuous little checkbox is a powerful thing. Before you decide to check it by default make sure you are staying within the bounds of applicable spam laws. It’s possibly not as simple as you think. In many countries it is a violation of spam laws to pre-check an opt-in box. Here’s a quick breakdown for the countries in which most of our users operate. To check your own country please see this great resource over at Mailchimp.

• United States – The opt-in box can be checked by default.
• Canada – No go. The law clearly states that subscribe checkboxes cannot be enabled by default unless you have implied consent. Read here for more info.
• Europe – It’s hard to say. The EU has adopted some great anti-spam laws but we’re having a hard time interpreting their opt-in requirements with enough understanding to make a recommendation. See what you can find here.

If you know the answer for your country please let us know in the comments. We’ll keep this list updated for our users.

A quick note about favicons

If you are using Postmatic Premium you’ll know that we grab the favicon used on your site and insert it into the comment notification template which is sent to your subscribers. Yesterday we were alerted that the function in Settings > Postmatic which refreshes the icon stopped working. We use a fantastic service, Grabicon, to power this feature. They recently made some api changes which broke our implementation.

A fix is coming in the next few days.

PS – If you haven’t already would you mind leaving us a review? Our reviews on WordPress.org are stellar but few. Each time someone leaves one our download numbers jump right up. Lend a hand?

WordPress has been known now and again to be a target for spammers. Most of it is in the form of comment spam. There is an entire army of plugins available to make sure bots can’t spam your comments area with their unsavory bits. It’s a cat and mouse game that, if you are on top of it, you can easily win. Posting a spam comment to the front-end of a WordPress site can be made nearly impossible. We even have a guide if you need some help.

But what about where we are now? In the new world of commenting by email?

Enter Postmatic. Now there is a brand new way to post a comment to your site – by email. Email. Home turf of spammers everywhere. The origin of it all. Where spamming began. The capital city of Spammopolis! We’ve created a convenient back door and it’s been our challenge since day one to be sureit is securely locked. We’ve probably spent more time thinking about, planning for, and building defenses against spam than most any other part of designing and executing Postmatic. It’s huge.

Just imagine this scenario.

You run a WordPress blog with 3,000 subscribers. Postmatic emails your post to 3,000 inboxes, and in the footer of each email is an invitation to leave a comment just by hitting reply (thereby subscribing to future comments as well) or at least subscribe to comments by replying ‘subscribe’. And let’s say this is a particularly interesting post. Five hundred people subscribe to the comments from either web or email. Ninety-nine people send a reply. And then one spambot sends in a reply and blasts a viagra ad to them all. Directly into 599 inboxes. And you can’t take it back. Email is forever. Ouch. This makes you look bad. It makes us look bad. It makes WordPress look bad. And it makes your subscribers run for the hills.

This is why we make subscribing to your site just a little bit harder than it needs to be.

When someone subscribes to your site or comments on a post they have to opt-in. That’s a no brainer. We send them an email with an overview of how it all works and prompt them to confirm their subscription by replying with the word agree. We don’t give them a convenient link because bots know how to click links. They’ve been doing it for years.

This method keeps the bots out and by training users to the behavior at present we can do something even cooler (and absolutely bulletproof) in the future: let the site admin define a question which the subscriber has to supply the correct answer to.

For example the subscription confirmation email on a Vermont-based blog might say in order to confirm your subscription please answer the following question: what is Vermont’s sweetest export? The answer, of course, would be maple or maple syrup.

These options put us in a good place to keep bots from ever becoming email-based subscribers to our customers’ sites.  We’ve sent millions of email on behalf of WordPress sites both high and low profile. And so far?

Not a single spam message.

WordPress has long benefited from a large number of plugins that allow commenters to subscribe to comments by email. Postmatic takes things a step further by not only sending new comment notifications but accepting replies as well.

Since there are so many different flavors of subscribe to comments plugins available we simply can’t write an importer for each. Some don’t even store the information in your local database. Of those that do the data is often very messy, inconsistent, and difficult to extract with accuracy.

We want to make it possible to switch to Postmatic without leaving those old subscriptions behind. Currently we have a hack available to help you do that, but we know we can do better.

Here’s our idea. Please let us know what you think.

When talking about people that have subscribed to comments in the past on your site they all have the same thing in common: they are engaged in a conversation or conversations. The probability is that they have left more than one comment on the post(s) to which they are subscribed. That’s the nature of a conversation, right? A little back-and-forth?

Let’s allow that to serve as the foundation. Let’s think about how to keep people engaged. 

This is how it would work

Postmatic would start by looking through your database to identify all of your commenters. Maybe there are 1,458. Let’s pick one out to walk through the scenario. I’m going to pick Chester.

Postmatic will look and see which posts Chester has left more than 1 comment on. These are the posts he cares about. Ok. Easy. Let’s say he has been active on 2 of your posts.

Now here is the tough part: we know Chester was involved in these 2 discussions but have no way of knowing if he actually subscribed to them. All we can assume is that we have a name and an email address for Chester. It’s a smart guess though that he cares about these posts, the subjects at hand, and the conversations he’s been in. Let’s see if that’s true.

So we shoot Chester an email with a personalized introduction (customized by you) saying something like:

Hey Chester, I’m switching over to a new commenting system on my blog. Since you have been an active commenter in the past I’d like to invite you to subscribe to the comment threads on the 2 posts which you have been active. When someone leaves a new comment on one of these posts we’ll shoot you an email with what they said. You can then send a reply back right from your inbox without ever hitting my site. Interested? You can unsubscribe from any conversation at any time.

Here are the discussions you were involved in:
– The nature of ugly ducklings from January 12, 2008. You left 4 comments. Other contributors include cyberhobo and jasonlemieux.
– Five reasons to bake chicken heads from March 8, 2012. You left 3 comments. Two were in reply to tommcfarlin.

If you would like to continue these conversations reply to this email with the word ‘subscribe’. If not you can ignore this email and you won’t be bothered again. Thanks!

The pros and cons of this idea

Pros

1. This could be a very proactive tool to reach out to people that weren’t ever actually subscribed. It would be a little nudge to remind them of the conversations they’ve been in and maybe get them interested and back into the fold
2. We don’t have to write importers for a dozen legacy plugins (which we have neither the time nor money to do)

Cons

1. This solution still does not solve the problem of retaining 100% of the legacy subscriptions. But.. again, I’m not sure we can actually do that for both financial and technical reasons. We need to find a middle ground.

What do you think? Does it seem like a fair solution? Would you use it on your site? Have any other ideas?

Please use the comments area to bat it around a bit. Subscribe if you’d like to stay in the loop. If we can come up with a solution that seems right we’ll get to work on it right away.

One of the largest feature differences between Postmatic free and Postmatic Premium can be found in how new post and comment notifications are formatted.

Prior to today’s release all emails sent from your site using the free plan were sent as plain text. This included new posts, invitations, comment notifications, and all transactional emails like subscribe and unsubscribe notices.

Premium account emails were sent in full html mode with support for images, galleries, embeds, widgets, shortcodes, and gravatars.

Looking back at our 1.0 release it seems like the disparity between the two is too large. Today brings step one in shrinking that gap; something we feel makes for a better experience for everyone.

What the new rendering engine looks like

Sending new posts

Comment notifications

We haven’t retired our reverse-markdown text engine altogether, though. We’ve put it to good use to make sure our multipart messages look great even on text-only devices. And now in 1.1 you can edit the plain-text version of your post before it leaves the door. Win win for everyone. Enjoy.

Want to experience email commenting? Do it right here.

Add a comment to this post. Jump into gmail, onto your phone, or head out on the road. The Postmatic team keeps an eye on it and will reply to you right away… and we can have a conversation.