I had an email (via our Exchange server) today that said ‘please use the voting buttons!’. My immediate thought was that it’s such an old method I’m surprise anyone is still using it. I think we first discovered them way back in around 2003 with an Exchange and Office upgrade. However, if you happen to be using a flavour of Microsoft Exchange, voting buttons might still have a lot going for them. But why?

Well, no other voting tool is so closely linked to your email – no link pasting or add-ons to install. Also, I’m asking you to make a choice, not for a long opinionated response. Voting is a great way to get the Yes / No you seek (and if you are a minimal sort like me, then all that chaff around the response itself usually just gets in the way). If you have composed your question carefully, and if a clear vote is appropriate, maybe there is still life in the email voting button.

When you have a WordPress.com blog (like I did),
you can submit posts by email – a nice simple way to publish content
without all the fuss of any other app or interface to deal with. Just tap
out your content, use the unique address you’ve been given and hit send.

You can do the same with your self hosted WordPress account. I’ve never
bothered to set up the Post By Email feature until now, but realise that
sending small posts to my blog by email could be a very easy and practical
method.

Turned out not to be quite so straight forward for me. Why? Well, I use
Google Apps, and since my all mail is routed via Google’s MX records, it
means that I can’t use my hosting package to handle the email without some
reconfiguration. The other immediately available option to me for WordPress
to collect email from a new Google Apps account, but it turns out these two
don’t play well together either.

I gave up with these methods, turned off the Post by Email feature
(removing the Postie plugin I had also tried in the process) and instead
setup an IFTTT recipe instead. All I need to do is send an email over to
the IFTTT Trigger (like I did to create this post).