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Comment by mgualt | Hacker News Reader

Can we use this as a comments system? For example, a blog would have an email address and leaving a comment would basically send an email to the address, and then it would be displayed as a comment beneath the blog entry. The benefit would be that we can use email spam filtering on the comments. The email could be sent either from the user's email address or you could send it from the application's email address to itself.

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Sure. You could use plus+addressing to identify the individual post or you could register an address that was specific for that post. Email Yak lets you call Register Address (http://docs.emailyak.com/register-address.html) to create as many email addresses as you want.

All plans have unlimited emil addresses included.

I've thought about implementing something like this; but, I keep coming up against two different arguments:

1. I think there's value to having people come to your site. Not just for traffic, but to keep them involved and aware of changes to the site.

2. Content being posted in the email can be far more complex than the content being posted in a simple Textarea. There's a nice dependency on the clean input of a textarea and a form submission. With rich email clients, you just need to take more care.

... of course, maybe that's just me being intimidated about thinking about the whole workflow in a different way than I'm used to.

What about Still providing a simple text box, but the action upon submit is sending an email. It needn't be from the commenter's email address, it could be from a separate email address "comments" or perhaps a separate adress for the individual post.

I considered building a commenting system like this myself, but I decided that users would find that more annoying than just filling in a textarea beneath the article.

I agree but there is no reason the text box couldn't achieve the same result -- sending an email. External client would nit be necessary. I have wondered why comments and google plus don't already work this way.

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