I can see from my email Sent folder that I have tried this before in 2017, 2018 and 2019 but I can’t for the life of me remember how successful those attempts were or why they didn’t turn into a consistent habit. Trying again now then as part of my personal site and blogging revival explorations.

Via email then, how do hyperlinks render when applied like this in an email client? How are bold and italic applied? How do images appear when just dragged into the email body? And how on earth would I apply alt text to the image via email? I fear that last point will need to be done retrospectively which could be a dealbreaker for images.

Let’s see.

Edit 1. OK. That only half worked, sadly. Text, text styling and image all uploaded, but even when I went into the admin to add alt text to the image, the post was formatted in the ‘classic’ wordpress.com CMS structure which amazingly doesn’t seem to cater for alt text.

There was an option at the bottom of the classic post however to ‘Convert to blocks’ (the more modern wordpress.com CMS method of building each post with a collection of separate blocks or ‘slices’ as I would have called them in a past life)

On doing that, an alt text option appears for the image block, which is nice.

Edit 2. Realised the post still had the ‘Uncategorized’ (with US spelling) default tag and was posted in the ‘Standard’ Post Format which wouldn’t work when posting other formats, so dug deeper into options for how posting by email is supposed to work and found a helpful Post by Email support page.

There are a number of these ‘Shortcodes’ that I could include in the email, and while the [tags x,y,z] one would help, there’s not one sadly for changing the Post Format which is maybe a deal breaker.

[title Your post title]
[slug your-post-slug]
[status publish | pending | draft | private]
[password secret-password]
[excerpt]some excerpt text[/excerpt]
[category x,y,z]
[tags x,y,z]
[delay +1 hour]
[comments on | off]
[nogallery] – disables the auto-gallery and displays all images inline
[ slideshow ] – (use without spaces) replaces the auto-gallery with a slideshow
[poll]questions and answers[/poll] – insert a Crowdsignal poll into your post (details below)
[publicize off | twitter | facebook]
[geotag on | off] – override your geotagging privacy defaults to enable or disable the showing of geo information
[more] – add a more tag
[nextpage] – create pagination
[end] – everything after this shortcode is ignored (i.e. signatures). Make sure it’s on its own line with a blank line above it.

Edit 3. Oh, and one more think I noticed was that by default, post by email makes hyperlinks open in the same window, and I’m one of those target=”_new” people.

Between no way to add image alt text in the email, no way to change format from standard to link or whatever, and no way to make links open in new windows, I think I remember why I’ve never bother to adopt this method. Perhaps this time at least I’ll remember that I wrote this and not try for a 5th time.

Back to the CMS only method.