Posterous is a blogging system that launched with an interesting twist — everything happens via email from signup to posting. Since the launch of our post by email features in addition to things like email comment replies and blog subscriptions we’ve been receiving more inquiries from people wanting to graduate from Posterous to a full blog with the features, flexibility, and reliability of WordPress.com.
It was actually easier than we thought: Posterous has a very nice API for reading from and writing to their service.
After logging into your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Tools -> Import.
Click on the Posterous importer.
Type in your Posterous host name, user name, and password and click the Submit button.
The importer will validate your user name and password. After starting the importer, you can sit back and watch the status counters tick away.
You can also safely leave the importer page or close your browser. The importer will keep running.
Currently, the importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.
We will send you an email when the import finishes. Easy peasy!
There are a few things still on our roadmap, like more auto-post functionality, but don’t worry it’ll all be ready soon.
WordPress.com News 
hmm, nice news. i think i’ll like it
Interesting! You are so quick in updating WordPress with the latest developments.
Very cool! Can I import my Posterous posts into my existing WP blog, or will it overwrite?
@Aaron Aiken: yes, you can import them into your existing blog. Your existing WordPress.com blog posts will not be overwritten.
Awesome! So, if I use Posterous Importer I can spend less time on my Posterior Imbedded?
(yes, I know…that was a bit of a stretch)
thanks very interesting
This is such a cool feature…wow! I have a photo blog on Posterous, and I was thinking it would have been a better idea to create it on WP since WP has such good photo blog themes, now, this is easy…peasy for me 🙂
In some ways, Posterous beats wordpress though. I really like how I can just attach music files to my e-mail & send to Posterous, and Posterous just converts it automatically to an embedded player on a post on the blog! Much more convenient than in wordpress.
You can do that with WordPress also! Post by Email attachments
Take them to wordpress
This would have been great two months ago, when I manually copied my posts from Posterous onto WordPress. 😉 Still, smart move, even if it’s too late for me. Posterous was a good intro for my blog group.
No videos yet?
and again after Vox, Posterous people will now be coming into wordpress.com, even if they like the post by emails, because with wordpress.com you can still post with email!.
also if i import to my site bizsetup.wordpress.com will it add to my content or write over my wp content?
@Max Soutter: It will add to your existing content.
i never even heard of ‘posterous’, i came to know about it from your post. it’s good you’ve made arrangements to take bloggers from there into wordpress, because there’s simply no replacement for wordpress at all. it’s good that they have a new idea, but wordpress is our final and permanent choice.
nice. i always liked posterous api
How do you import a windows live space blog?
@karshs: Currently we don’t offer an importer for Windows Live Spaces.
Great! I love Posterous, it’s got a lot of magic! But at some point you need more features… Especially when it comes to SEO and monetising via SEM.
This is nice for people that want to leave Posterous and come to WordPress.com for more features. However I like having the two different platforms and I post completely different things to Posterous than I do on my WordPress.com blog. But you are so right about WordPress.com having more features and being more flexible. Thanks for adding new features for us.
hmm…so I tried importing my Posterous blog. I got an email from WordPress saying Import successful, but I don’t see the photos on my site!! I also looked at Edit Posts folder in my Dashboard, and I see only the auto-created Hello World post…is there something else I should be doing?
My newly created plog is at http://nishitasplog.wordpress.com/
My Posterous site is at http://booksandmore.posterous.com
Nish – Please contact support at https://wordpress.com/support/contact/ to get help.
Really good development, Would like to commend you guys for keeping yourselves ontop of the game.
Kudos.
You say the importer will bring over “posts, tags, comments and image attachments”. What happens to PPS files or MP3 files or DOC or XLS files sent to the Posterous blog? Will those come over as well?
Also, Posterous has a really nice way of displaying those attached files, which WordPress does not have yet. Any plans to automatically embed PPS or DOC or MP3 files? (I’m aware I can embed MP3 files now, but it’s still not as straightforward as embedding images or videos).
Thanks!
@Raoul, At this time only image attachments can be imported from Posterous.
Thanks for this great tool! I’ve been tossing around the notion of moving my posterous to a self hosted word press blog for the past week. Is this tool only for a wordpress.com blog, or would I have to do a path of importing it to wordpress.com and then moving it to my own server? Thanks in advance for your help!
@mwong81 The importer is only available for WordPress.com – but yes, you can do the two step method of importing your Posterous blog to WordPress.com and then exporting to your own server.
That’s good news Brian. Thanks for all the work you are doing to help bloggers with importing their content into wordpress.com. 🙂
whoaa..that sounds good…thanks for helping.
thanks so much for this. BUT what happens to my posterous email subscribers and contributors? do they automatically become subscribers to my wp?
@Max Soutter, no not at this time.
good thanks
Awesome!
So much better than when we were pre-Posterous. 🙂 Nice feature. (Bad pun)
I am extremely frustrated by the blue borders around ‘live’ links. On aesthetic grounds. How can I have a link ‘live’ with no border?
@nickwardscenarios A couple of options: choose a theme that doesn’t display blue link borders, or purchase the CSS upgrade and modify your theme’s CSS to remove the link borders: https://wordpress.com/support/custom-css/
You make it sound so easy and I bet it is!
Welcome all new Posterous bloggers!
Wow. Once again WordPress has outdone itself. way to go!
Looks really interesting – must check this out 🙂
Posterous is so cool i surely won’t merge it with my WP blogs. It’s just perfect standalone ‘tool’ and its power for me is: to stay outside WordPress. Altough i understand migrating users.
a nice feature… let’s try it
Gave the import a whirl earlier this evening. I was dumbfounded by how simple and quick it was. Only had to tweak a couple image headers in a few posts. Otherwise flawless. Now to prep my hosted WP theme and export out to that! Thanks!
I will try Posterous Blogging in one of my sites… It looks very interesting for added services in my site…
Very nice feature guys, I am starting to out grow posterous and this is great. However I think I will wait until you support more than just mp3 embeds. Also, Posterous’ commenting is so easy to use and comments help spread my blog on twitter which I appreciate. I don’t see that on wordpress.com.
so if i have already cross-posted some content from my posterous blog to my wp blog, will the importer notice and leave out duplicate entries?
Thanks!
good to know
What’s the process for skinning my Website to Posterous, or are there published procedures available somewhere?
@fgcarlsen You can’t do that. The Posterous importer is a tool to let you bring in your content from a Posterous blog to WordPress.com, not for skinning your website.
I think the Posterous bloggers are going to be VERY happy at WordPress.com!!!
Very interesting, does anyone know how it’s pronounced?
Great development guys. Really interested to see how this all plays out now.
WordPress is pretty popular here in East Africa, can’t wait to see this bring even more of those who’ve started walking down the Posterous way into the fold.
i don’t see much point in transporting posterous blog over here. i can autopost my posts from posterous to wordpress and other sites in one go. =)
Congrats on the importer!
Posterous users who are importing into WordPress: just make sure that you don’t delete your Posterous blog since WordPress won’t rehost your media. It’ll also not support the audio or video that you’ve posted to your Posterous. Makes you feel like you’re “graduating” to a blog platform that does less. You can always just post to Posterous and have it autopost to your WordPress (and gazillion other sites).