Emailing to SharePoint Blogs

There are several places to find information on how to "email-enable" a SharePoint 2007 blog -- that is, to make it possible to post to the blog by sending email to it. At my job, I am helping to set up our "Rain King Chronicle" blog to do exactly that, and learned some interesting things about the process, particularly with regard to attachments.

Rich-Text is OK
We discovered that rich-text (HTML) email can be accepted by the SharePoint blog. Images included in-line and attached by the email client are successfully stored and appropriately displayed inline in the blog post (but see below).

Attachment Inequality
Ordinary file attachments to emails are accepted by the blog. Links to the attachments are displayed at the bottom of the post. When you edit a post from the Web interface (EditPost.aspx), you can delete attachments if you like. What you cannot do is add an attachment in the Web interface, whether creating a new post or editing an existing post. In this sense, email posters are "privileged" over web posters to the same blog.
 
Mac Images - No Resource Fork
If you are emailing from a Maciintosh, be sure to save images as "web-ready" (without resource forks) before embedding or attaching them to emails to your SharePoint blog.  The server will simply disregard emails that include undecipherable (to SharePoint) attachments -- no bounce, no error message.

Where'd They Go?
If you look at the blog "Home" page, or at the "Post" display page (Post.aspx), you won't see the attachments displayed, or even listed.  If you look at "Manage Posts" (Lists/Posts/AllPosts.aspx), you can see the paper clip that shows attachments are present, and if you edit the item, you will see the attachments listed at the bottom.  For some reason, display of attachments with the text of the post was not included in the "Blog" template.  You can add it to the Home and Posts page, if you're not afraid of SharePoint Designer and some XSLT.  But that's a subject for another post.