Maria’s Guides

• #4337 Blog by Email: No content is assumed
  Patch for WordPress 2.2 not recognizing content of post by e-mail. On WordPress.org.
  (tags: wordpress hack Troubleshooting)

And some other information you might find useful.

I finally upgraded my personal blog to the latest version of WordPress, which is version 2.2.2 (as I write this). In addition to breaking a handful of my plugins — not a big deal, since I was able to replace just about all of them with newer, better versions — it also broke WordPress’s post by e-mail feature, which we discuss on pages 64-66 of our WordPress book.

The Post by E-Mail Feature and How It Broke

If you’re not familiar with this feature, you might want to be. It’s pretty cool. It enables you to send an e-mail message to a special account you set up for WordPress to check. When WordPress finds a message there, it automatically posts the content of the message to your blog, using a predefined category that you choose. The message subject becomes the post title.

In WordPress 2.2, WordPress simply stopped seeing and importing the body of the message. As a result, you’d wind up with properly titled but otherwise empty post.

The Fix

Some research on WordPress.org uncovered a post which explained the problem and offered patch code for the class-pop3.php file. This file, which resides in the wp-includes folder of a WordPress server installation, is responsible for processing posts by e-mail.

I manually replaced the bad code with the new code in my file and tested the results. It worked fine.

Rather than fiddling around with code like I did, you can simply download the revised file here. UnZip it and use it to replace your current class-pop3.php file. (If you’re smart, you’ll save a copy of your current file — perhaps by renaming it right in the folder in which it resides — before replacing it.)

This file definitely works on my WordPress 2.2.2 setup. It might not work with earlier or later versions of WordPress or on your setup if it has been heavily modified, so try it at your own risk.

A Neat Trick

While I was researching the problem, I picked up a neat trick in the WordPress Codex.

If you use post by e-mail, you probably know that your e-mail messages won’t be posted unless WordPress checks for mail. As we wrote in our book (on page 66), there are at least two ways to do this: manually by opening a specific Web browser page or automatically using a plugin.

But there is another way to automate the process and it’s pretty easy for WordPress novices who aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and modify a template file. Simply include the following code in your theme’s footer.php file:

<iframe src="http://<em>yourblogdomain</em>/<em>wordpressinstalldir</em>/wp-mail.php" name="mailiframe" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title=""></iframe>

This forces WordPress to check for mail every time someone loads any page on your site.

The drawback to this is that if your site is very busy, your server will be checking pretty often for e-mail messages. But it seems to me that you could include the same code on another template page that’s used less often, perhaps category.php (if present) or archive.php or page.php.

Hopefully, you’ll find this information useful. As usual, comments are welcome. Use the Comments link or form below to share your thoughts with me and other visitors.

• Mac OS X: Mac OS Extended format (HFS Plus) volume and file limits
  Learn the limits for files and volumes on disks that use the Mac OS Extended format (HFS Plus) in Mac OS X, including journaled HFS+ volumes. On Apple’s Support site.
  (tags: Apple MacOS Macintosh)

And offers 40% discounts on books purchased online.

Just a quick note to pass along some info I got in e-mail from Peachpit Press, one of my publishers.

Over the last several months, you’ve been talking and now it’s our chance to show you that we’ve been listening. You told us you wanted better and faster searches for our books and content. You said you wanted more videos, better access to our authors, and more ways to get involved. After listening to everything you had to say, we’re proud to introduce the newly redesigned Peachpit.com.

They’ve added features to the site, including online video tutorials, access to blogs, and online reference guides. But the news that might interest you most is that they’re also offering a 40% discount on all books purchased on the site:

To thank you for your feedback and to celebrate our new site we would like to offer you a 40% discount on your purchases. Just order before September 15 and enter coupon code PPT-NEWSITE-EM01 during checkout!

Sounds like a good deal to me. I hope you’ll take advantage of it, perhaps to buy one or more of my books?

Confirmation e-mails from sites you never joined.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail message that went something like this:

From: [omitted]
Subject: Member Confirm
Date: August 20, 2007 9:05:49 PM MST
To: [omitted]

Welcome,

Thank You for Joining Web Cooking.

Confirmation Number: 769799922
Temorary Login: user4129
Password ID: qb371

Your temporary Login Info will expire in 24 hours. Please login and change it.

This link will allow you to securely change your login info: http://[IP address omitted]/

Thank You,
Membership Support Department
Web Cooking

Trouble is, I haven’t signed up for any Web site with that name using the e-mail address the message was sent to. And although the clickable URL was very tempting to check out — after all, I could have forgotten that I’d signed up for something — I was hot and tired and ready to call it quits for the day.

This morning, I got a very similar message sent to the same e-mail address from another site. That’s when I became sure that something was up.

You see, just the other day, I was listening to the Future Tense podcast while washing my helicopter. One of the stories was about the “Storm Virus,” which is being spread by e-mail. One of the ways they spread this virus is by sending you an e-mail with a link to a Web site. Idiots click this link and go to a Web page, which then takes advantage of security holes in the visitor’s brower to infect the computer. You’ve probably gotten one of these messages — they often lure you by telling you that someone has sent you an electronic greeting card.

Apparently, they’ve come up with a new way to lure you to a site.

So my word of warning here — do not click any link in an e-mail message you receive unexpectedly from someone you don’t know.

And if anyone else has more information about this virus or new series of e-mail spam cons, please do use the Comments link or form below to let us know. Thanks.

Put them in any order you like.

Here’s a quick tip from my Tiger book that I didn’t remember until I stumbled on it today. More proof that writing a book about something doesn’t mean you remember everything in it.

You can change the order of the icon menus on the far right end of the menu bar. Just hold down the Command key and drag the icon to the left or right. The other icons will shift to make room for it. The screenshot here shows me moving the battery icon on my MacBook Pro to the left.

The only menu icon you can’t move using this technique is the Spotlight menu.