Postmatic is hoping to revolutionize WordPress comments by giving readers a way to subscribe to new posts/comments via email and leave a comment by simply hitting reply. Since email is usually the way most people find out about comments, having the ability to reply without leaving your inbox in convenient, especially when you’re on the go.
Postmatic’s post and comment subscriptions feature is quite similar to Jetpack’s subscriptions module. Jetpack is the plugin’s strongest competitor. While both plugins are free and perform similar functions, Postmatic includes the added ability to reply by email, subscription invitations, and a mobile-friendly email template that is fully customizable.
Today, Postmatic’s co-founder Jason Lemieux announced that the plugin now supports single-click migration of subscribers from Jetpack. The beta 6 version of the plugin introduces a secure importer that will copy over all of your new post notification Jetpack subscribers in a matter of seconds.
Beta 6 adds a native Postmatic exporter to allow users to export their subscribers, along with subscription preferences, to a CSV file. Postmatic’s creators are also gradually adding to a shortcode whitelist that will allow the display of third-party shortcode content in emails.
The plugin is available on WordPress.org and is production ready but is still in limited-release beta. Postmatic is releasing a few hundred API keys per week to those who sign up for beta access.
In the future, the Postmatic creators hope to monetize the plugin by offering paid delivery of outgoing mail for larger sites, Lemieux told Post Status in a recent interview. They also have an extensive list of planned features. The basic Postmatic plugin, however, will remain free for any number of blogs with any number of posts and subscribers.
So when will we a message in the Jetpack changelog that says “Easily reply to comments via email”? It’s a nice feature and one I think I’d take advantage of if I didn’t need to format any of the text.