I was initially impressed with the way Postie works and jumped onto it to install & configure it for this site. Well, I followed the instructions and did everything to install it correctly. It worked well, but I then stumbled upon a major challenge: how to configure it to suit my requirements?

I first thought of using my Yahoo email id (because the server details were readily available). I provided my personal Yahoo email (which I use frequently) for testing Postie and ran manual fetching, Postie was displaying a few messages on the screen (refer the screenshot). At first, I did not understand even a single word of it, but Postie was continuously “deleting” emails from my mailbox. It stopped at around 700th email because it ran out of memory. I was wondering what has happened until now – whether Postie had fetched all emails and posted them on my site, or it had actually deleted those emails… Worryingly I checked my Yahoo mailbox and to my horror, Postie had actually deleted those 700 emails from my mailbox – permanently deleted, forever!!!

I cursed Postie like anything, but there was hardly anything that I could do to retrieve those emails. I would advise a caution: While using Postie, DO NOT USE your personal email at all – it permanently deletes all the emails as it fetched them. Instead, create a dedicated email which will be used only for the purpose of posting on your site.

I was using cPanel email id, so I first contacted the administrator to get the protocol and server address. Then I created a dedicated email address for this site and tested Postie. Testing showed it worked, but the post was actually not “fetched”. I ran Postie manually, but it also did not succeed. It gave some strange errors…

After going through a few threads in Rob Felty forum, I came to know about the “Authorized Emails” field under “User” tab – I entered the email address from which I will be posting on my site and then tested it again – it worked like magic! Later I entered all the emails from which I may be sending posts on this site: my work email and personal email. Now it works perfect! I just need to study the various parameters provided by Postie – like :start, :end, etc.

You can download Postie plugin from the official WordPress Plugin Directory.