Download Squad

I just finished testing it out, and it worked exactly as advertised. The delay between sending the email (I used my Gmail account to send from) and having it show up on my site was about 3 minutes, which is certainly reasonable. My only quibble is that the post had "Published with BlogMailr" appended to the end of it, which I'd rather not have showing up in every single post I make on my blog. I hope that this is an option that can be configured, but as I attempted to log into my account to see, I was greeted with a dark screen that said simply "please wait while we perform an update with cool new stuff".

I'll check back to see whether this is an option we can turn off, and update this post. Of course, I'm sure that by the time I do that, our commenters will already have let you know!

The other concern that you may have with using a service like this is that you're having to hand over your login and password to a third party. As always, keep regular backups; I'm sure the folks at BlogMailr have the best of intentions, but a security breach could theoretically leave their users vulnerable to site defacement. Personally, this doesn't concern me - maybe I've become too complacent about putting my personal data online (but that's another story) - but I thought it needed to be mentioned.

[Update] The site is back up, so I was able to look into BlogMailr's background a bit. My security concerns are significantly abated by the fact that it turns out BlogMailr is run by Telligent, a very well-respected company.

Then I looked into the "Published with BlogMailr" thing, and the news is not good. Short of signing up for a commercial account, there's no way to remove the tag line from being added to your posts - that is, every single post you make using their service will have this spam appended to it. Worse, the commercial account is $5 per month, which is absurdly expensive considering what the service does. It seems even BlogMailr agrees; they only ask people that are earning more than $300 per month on AdSense (or, I assume, other ad networks) to purchase commercial accounts.

In my opinion, it might be fair for BlogMailr to ask users to include a link back to them on their blog on the homepage, but to add an unwanted message to every post just reeks of the dank underbelly of the internet. I would have thought Telligent would be more, well, intelligent about how they would go about this.

So, in case I left you wondering, I won't be using BlogMailr any time soon, until they reconsider the policy of adding unwanted content to their user's posts.