Jul 3 2008

Posterous allows you to blog by emailing

Bilal Hameed | 65 Views

Posterous, a new YCombinator funded startup, has taken aim at making blogging as simple as sending an email. The process of creating a blog on Posterous is simple, just send an email to post@posterous.com and you’re done.

Posting to Posterous is even simpler and something that you have been trained to do already. All you have to do is send an email. The title of the email becomes the title of the blog post, with the body becoming the text of the post. You can also attach photos, video and audio files. The media files get rendered in their slick flash player. You can check out our posterous blog here.

Setting up the posterous blog was really a piece of cake. The service is quiet similar to Tumblr, yet even simpler and with the email twist. You can change your settings to get comments emailed to you and can reply to those comments by email.

Techcrunch however found security to be a serious issue with Posterous as anyone could send a fake email to your posterous blog, thus effectively sending spam to your entire subscription base. Arrington offered a free T Shirt to anyone, who manages to send a fake post on their blog. Needless to say that the competition was over within no time.

Posterous has in someway tried to address the issue of forged email according to their FAQ:

Email can easily be spoofed, but Posterous has come up with some ways to figure out if the email we receive comes from you. If we think it might not be you, we ask you to confirm the email before we post it. No matter what, you always get an email notification of every post we put online for your blog, with an easy link to remove the post if you didn’t do it. And remember, if you’re running into problems with people abusing your account, help is just one email away.

Posterous currently works seamlessly with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail and provides 1GB of space to upload and blog about your photos and other stuff. It already has integrated beautifully with Youtube and in case you send a link to a youtube in your email to Posterous, it automatically detects it and embeds the Youtube video in your blog post.

In my brief encounter with the site, I have come up loving it already. Give it a try and you’ll have similar thoughts.