Unfortunately neither of these issues can be addressed by a minor update of the plugin. For one because the API just doesn’t provide an interface to the reason why a comment is held for moderation. Secondly it’s expensive (to almost impossible) to tell whether an E-mail address in the comments table has already been verified by a user through my plugin.

To be honest: I don’t think I’ll update my plugin here unless somebody is willing to pay for half a day of work or so. This goes way beyond what I have needed in any of my projects so far. If you like you can always edit it yourself, though, and if you send me your version I might as well add it to my version and give you heaps of credit on my blogs and in the readme, i.e. on wordpress.org

Yes I have observed this behavior — previously approved commenters have had their comments held in moderation due to links.

In the Discussion section of WordPress settings, you can flag certain keywords that will tell WordPress to put the comment into moderation, not necessarily marking it as spam. The Discussion section also lets you hold a comment for moderation if it contains links. It doesn’t mark the comment as spam.

I have comments set up to auto-approve from previously approved commenters. This way I don’t have to babysit comments from repeat commenters, since it is from someone I already know.

But I also set WordPress to hold comments if they contain links. If someone posts a link in a comment, I want to see it first before publishing the comment.

So when a comment from a previously approved commenter comes in with a link, it is not sent to the spam queue, it is held for moderation.

So in either of these situations (comment held for flagged keywords or containing links), if I set up WordPress this way, your plugin will send out the email anyway.

I imagine there must be some way to accomodate this situation — check the comment author email in the DB for a previously approved comment before sending the email?

I would have to double check but I don’t think WordPress would hold the comment for moderation in the scenario you described. It would either be considered spam (keywords) or allowed (links would be ignored). I am afc (posting this from a mobile device) and can’t perform the check myself now, so if you do, please share your findings, or wait until I find the time to follow up!

What about if the comment is held for moderation because it contains links or flagged keywords, but is posted by a previously approved commenter?

They’ve already posted a comment, so they’ve already verified their email, but their comment is being held for moderation by WordPress. They should not get a verify email request. Will they get the verify email anyway?