Whenever an email is either sent to a Blog Submission author, or received from an author, the email message will appear in the Activity area at the right of the screen as shown below:

Anytime an email message is either sent or received, the date and time of that message will be updated in a field called "Last Comm Date," which you can see by scrolling down near the bottom of a blog submission.

IF the email message is an incoming message that was sent by the author, an additional field will appear that looks like this:

If this "Comm Status" field appears, it means that the last communication received was from the author, and the author is awaiting a reply from the Blog Submission Reviewer. Rather than having to comb through every single Blog Submission, searching to see which one is in need of a reply, you can simply click on "Blog Submissions," so that you are seeing the "Team Views" panel as shown below, and click on "Needs Reply" to filter out just those records that are in need of reply.

For example, let's say that a recent Blog Submission was Published, and the author sent us back an email to tell us how great this news is. The message will appear in the Activity area like this:

The ONLY way to get the "Needs Reply" notification to turn off is by replying to the message they have sent. So, in this case, we will click the "Reply" link as shown above, just below the author's message to us.

To save yourself having some time, click on the "Boilerplate Replies" button as shown above.

In this case, let's choose "You're Welcome!"

At this point, you can type in your own message, whatever you decide is best. When you are finished, click the send button:

By replying to the authors message, you have turned off the "Needs Reply" notification. Remember, it was just above the "Last Comm Date?" Now it is gone.

AND, the "Last Comm Date" field has been updated to the time and date of the message you just sent to the author.

If you go back to the "Team View," you will see that the number of authors that are in "Needs Reply" status has just been reduced.