A few hours ago I came across a plugin that I think is just thrilling! I hope that you will too. Owen, from Ugh’s!! Greymatter Honeypot has create a wordpress plugin that he’s called the comment email responder.
What is it? Simply put it allows you to both comment on your site and fire off an email with the same wording to a specific commenter on your site.
How does it work? It’s a plugin that, once activated and set up with your return email address and few other simple options, will place a small envelope icon beside the name of anyone that leaves you a comment on a post. I believe only the site administrator can see these icons beside the commentators names. When you want to respond to a comment just click on the icon beside the persons name. The cursor will move the comment box. Write your comment within your post as you normally would do and submit. When you submit your comment a copy of what you just wrote will be sent to the persons whose envelope icon you clicked.
Doesn’t that sound great?
Often when I get comments on my various sites I’ll send an email reply to the commenter. If I think that it’s something that should be on the site I’ll copy what I wrote in the email and paste it into the comment area on my blog, or the other way around – comment pasted into email.
This will save a lot of time! Sometimes when I get a lot of comments I’ll just place a comment here and there on my site and not send an email to each person who left a comment, or I’ll reply here and there by email to comments. Now, I can reply to anyone that I want on the site and by email at the same time.
The only request that I’d love to have added to this plugin is that when it sends an email to a commenter it doesn’t include the blog url or the post url. I think that it would be helpful if it included that as well, because I’m sure that some people go around commenting on many sites and when they do get a reply by email, if they’d like to respond on the specific site clicking an email link would make it easier. Other than that I’m extremely pleased with this plugin.
Try this plugin out yourself. I really think that this is going to be one of those must have wordpress plugins.
Oh and if you enjoy it as much as I have so far offer Owen a small donation via Paypal. He definitely deserves it.