E is for Enabling Email

Wow, I'm late getting this post up today! It's on account of the food poisoning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could've been on the ball and had it scheduled long before the food poisoning hit. I didn't on account of the intense revisions. See? I can come up with an excuse for anything!

Two things today, bloggers & commenters, and they're both about email. How to respond to comments via email, and how to let others respond to you via email. 

For the last week or two, I've been mostly responding to comments via email. It's been a hard decision to switch from commenting in the comments to commenting in emails, but I think it's what will work best. Please, PLEASE, I beg of you: Please enable your email so I can respond to you!! It makes me 50 kinds of sad when you leave a comment that so begs a response, and I can't respond! I know it makes other bloggers want to cry into their keyboards, too. I speak for people I've no right to speak for when I say, I SWEAR we will do nothing nefarious with your email address. If you're still nervous about giving it out, maybe think about getting a second email account used just for blogging. It doesn't have to use whatever email address you use to sign in.

And huge apologies, WordPress / other non-Blogger blog users! Blogger is what I know. Okay, so first things first.

Enabling your email so that others can respond to your comments via email:

This one is actually easy. Go to your profile. You can do this by clicking on your name link in any comment that you make.

Or, if you are using the old interface of blogger, from your dashboard, click on Edit Profile.

Or, if you're using the new interface of Blogger, in the top right hand corner, you'll see your name with a little triangle next to it. Click on the triangle, and you'll see ...

... this. Blogger Profile. Click on it.

Then on the screen that comes up, click on Edit Profile in the top right.

Then, just enter whatever email address you want, and save. Easy peasy. And remember-- it doesn't have to be the email you sign in with-- it can be any email address you want. (Although I wouldn't recommend setting it to somebody else's email address just to be funny. But that would be funny.)

If you want to reply to your commenters' comments by email:

This is actually pretty simple, too. All you have to do is have Blogger email any comments to the email address you use for this kind of thing. When those emails come in, you can just reply to them (as long as they set up their email-- if they didn't, their email address will show up as noreply-comment@blogger.com)

If you're using the old Blogger interface, Go to your settings tab, click comments, then scroll to the bottom, enter whatever address you want for the Comment Notification Email (this one doesn't have to be the one you sign in with, either.) Then click Save Settings.

If you're using the new Blogger interface, go to Settings on the left, then choose Mobile and Email (still on the left), then enter the Comment Notification Email. Whatever email works for you, regardless of what you sign in with.

Piece of cake, right? Any questions?

Do you comment to comments via email ever? If so, help me try to talk everyone into enabling their email in the comments. Then I don't have to speak for you when it comes to the whole non-nefarious uses thing. :)