How does Facebook's Comment by Email feature work?

As we move further and further into the always on, always connected age, it makes complete sense to me that you want to be able to stay plugged in with Facebook whether you're in your office, at home or even on the road. Not having a smartphone, however, does make that a little bit tricky, as you are realizing.

The main problem is that there's a nice Facebook app for the newest phones, including a very well written one for the iPhone (though it's not without its quirks and bugs, but that's another story).

Sounds like you have something more basic, though, but one that's sophisticated enough that it lets you access your email. Though you can't yet submit status updates from email, you can respond to other people's comments, which is still pretty darn fun in my experience.

You've probably already been told in the emails you get from Facebook, but didn't notice. Check out this status update email:

I've highlighted the line in question: "New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this status."

To test it out, I did just that, without deleting the older material. Here's the message I sent:

Notice that the message includes the comment wrapped in square brackets too.

Switching to Facebook, here's the result:

Looks like I just barely exceeded the Facebook maximum for status updates (and it also looks like it didn't know how to rewrap the text so that it flowed properly, something to keep in mind if you're going to do lots of comments via email), so I'll click on "See More" and:

So that's your answer. Yes, you can reply to comments via email and any text that appears before the quoted material shows up in the status update. Hope that's helpful!

While we're on the topic, I should highlight that I have a lot of facebook help here, and that there's also an AskDaveTaylor Facebook fan page if you'd like to sign up!