Like Plain Jane Mom and others have lamented, it’s hard to know whether to reply to commenters via email, ie privately, or to respond to them via your blog in the comments, ie publicly. The trouble with the former is that the conversation is lost on your blog and the trouble with the latter is that the person you’re responding to via another comment might not check back to read it. Of course, you could do both (which I have occasionally done) but this is clunky and a bit time consuming.
But there is a way which I have just implemented here. A WordPress plugin called Comment email responder. This means:
The response becomes a comment in the normal way, but also fires off an email to the commentor with the content of the response and his original comment.
I haven’t tested it yet because I’ve had no comments since I added the plugin so I’ll give it a go and see what I think. I’d like to know what you think too.