[From Dmitry Chestnykh’s Blog]

Hey.  It may be a workaround but it is sure better that what MSN has provided us!  Robin Curry has posted a GotDotNet project that involves creating a MetaWeblog API Web Service that in turn will send a email via SMTP to the MSN Spaces email address configured for Email Publishing for that space.

Here is the info from Robin’s blog:

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Sometime back I started a personal blog over on msn spaces in addition to my more tech-focused blog here. Being the lazy guy I am and not wanting to have to open two different tools to post to both my technical blog here and my personal blog over there, one of the first things I did was to find out if spaces supported any of the blogging APIs.

A quick google search brought me to Dare's disappointing explanation that the MSN team wasn’t fond of the existing APIs and were exploring options.

Ok, that's fine, I thought. It's in beta, they're figuring things out. I can wait a month or two. Well, I got tired of waiting, so I rolled my own makeshift solution. I’ve put it in a gotdotnet workspace in case anybody else finds it useful.

Introducing PostToSpaces - a MetaWeblogAPI web service endpoint that allows users to submit posts to an MSN Space.

Get it here (via gotdotnet): Download

What is it? It’s a simple little web service that simply intercepts a MetaWeblog.newPost method call, creates an SMTP mail containing the post, and sends it to the MSN Spaces email address configured for Email Publishing for the space. No more, no less.

To use it, you’ll need a server to host the service that has a configured smtp server. Follow the instructions below.

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
-------------------------
1. Copy the service to the desired server and configure a virtual directory to point to it.
2. Change the config values in the web.config to point to the appropriate SmtpServer
   and to use your Send From Email Address as configured in your MSN space.
3. When calling the newPost method, parameters should represent the following:
    - blogid = [not used]
    - username = [MSN space name]
    - password = [MSN space email publishing secret word]
    - post = [struct containing your post title and description]
    - publish = [not used]

In a follow up post, I’ll talk about how I hooked PostToSpaces up with BlogJet for unified posting goodness…

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