Comment Reply via Email Improvements

Since opening up the comment reply via email feature to everyone last month we’ve been continuing to improve it. Here are some of changes that have gone in during the last few weeks:

  • Better detection of email auto responders / vacation messages
  • Added a reminder to the bottom of comment notification emails about the reply via email feature
  • Vastly improved support for non-English character sets
  • Fixed a problem that some iPhone users were seeing
  • Improved email address parsing for Blackberry users
  • Fixed cases where signature blocks weren’t being properly removed
  • Better paragraph formatting when parsing comments

And many little tweaks to deal with the oddities of various email clients. You’d be amazed how many email clients have their own little quirky ways of doing things.

For users who don’t include quoted reply text in your emails I do want to point out that you’ll need to end your email comment reply with !END on a line by itself. We’ll detect this in place of quoted reply text and use everything above the !END line as the new comment. This is mentioned on the comment reply via email support page but I wanted to bring specific attention to this to avoid any confusion.

We want to make comment reply via email 100% for every user, so if you have any problems with it at all please contact support. Or, if you just want to hi, that’s okay too 🙂


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31 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. pashkovski

    wowowowowowowow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i need this!!!!!! thx

    Like

  2. Fed

    Well played guys

    Like

  3. Moses

    sweet… faster! 🙂

    Like

  4. Andrew

    Thanks for all your hard work, guys!

    Like

  5. trollboy

    reply by email is great. Sometimes it hasn’t worked, but overall it’s still a nice feature.

    Like

  6. Aiman Amani Karim

    Ooooh…. I love this feature!

    Like

  7. Mary

    I think many people are going to enjoy this. 🙂

    Like

  8. Euglossine Bee

    Great feature!

    1. Why is it [end] for post by email and !END for comment reply?
    2. On my post by email attempts, spaces are removed from tags (so [tags one potato, two potato] gives me onepotato and twopotato as tags (sorry, this bug is for post by email, but I am too lazy to find the right place to report this.)

    Like

    • Joseph Scott

      For comment reply we used !END because that it is what IntenseDebate used. To make it easier on people I’ve also added [end] support to comment reply via email, so you can use it for there as well.

      For the space stripping issue on tags for post via email please contact support and we’ll track down what’s going on.

      Like

  9. eviwidi

    I’m waiting for this feature and finally I can use it in my WP! Thanks a lot Joseph..:)

    Like

  10. Vikas Gupta

    Keep improving! 😀 WP is the best blogging platform just the same!

    Like

  11. Yasir Imran

    Awesome !

    Like

  12. yarnaholic

    I really love having this feature, but am a bit confused about the correct Discussion settings. Does this mean I need to check moderate every comment in addition to being notified by email about new comments?

    Like

    • Joseph Scott

      No you don’t have to check moderate comments to use this. It’s the notification emails that are used to send it a reply to a comment.

      Like

  13. elisatogether

    thank you!

    Like

  14. Narendra

    i simply love this feature…nice to know that you guys are constantly working to make every feature better…

    Like

  15. frederic sidler

    I checked the “notify me of follow-up comments via emails” below to receive the next comments of this thread by email. Will I be able to answer to this email by email. I will see 😉

    When you add such a functionnality to the wordpress.com website, is it something that comes automatically to the open source version of the wordpress product?

    Like

    • Joseph Scott

      Comment reply via email currently only works for comment notification emails sent to blog authors. That’s something we’re looking at though.

      Like

  16. Michael

    I also love the feature because it saves valuable time for writing in responses and I’m glad continue on working out the bugs in the system which also helps.

    Like

  17. Rizal

    hmm,
    i will try it ASAP.

    Like

  18. ccsx

    >>Vastly improved support for non-English character sets.
    You really did a great job!! Two Thumbs Up!!

    Like

  19. Jan Shim

    For some reason, this feature no longer works for me. It was working beautifully on the day this feature was announced both from my Email and from my phone. Now, both fail. Any idea what might be causing this?

    Like

  20. Jana Bouc

    Will the new tweaks remove the line breaks that make my replies have so many short choppy lines? I always have to go back to my comments on WP to clean up the line breaks and it would be great to not have to do that!
    And when you say “signature blocks weren’t being properly removed” do you mean that I don’t have to delete my automatically inserted signature block when I reply to a message before sending it anymore?

    Like

    • Joseph Scott

      Added some formatting to code to deal with the short choppy lines, that was one of the improvements.

      In most cases signature blocks were already being removed. We found some cases where that wasn’t happening and added code to look for those cases. So yes, you shouldn’t have to delete your automatically inserted signature when sending a comment reply.

      Like

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  23. rhondascooking

    This feature is great! I tried it yesterday.

    Like

  24. kamododragon

    Very Cool and Yes I like it

    Like

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