One thing I had been wanting for WordPress blogs for a while was a way to have the comments I reply to get sent to the original commenter’s email. So that they have some kind of notification that I’ve replied, and that they can come back and sort of continue the conversation. It’s one of the great things about LiveJournal — it does it by itself, because it’s made to foster more of a conversational community than WordPress was.

Anyway, I did some searches a few months ago and found this Comment-To-Email plugin. It worked well for a while and it was cool, but sometime in April, I started getting browser errors when trying to use it, and basically it didn’t work anymore. I did a quick search this morning for an alternative, and found Comment Email Responder, which apparently has gone through more testing and more versions, and the author is interested in improving it, so I’m hoping it continues to work reliably, because it’s pretty cool. Allows you to set up a standard footer for the email replies, and lets you configure what the subject line should say when replying.

So if anyone’s been looking for this type of plugin, I recommend Comment Email Responder (unless it stops working sometime in the future).