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How to CFMAIL Properly and Keep the SPAM in the Can

May 27

posted by Wil Genovese in ColdFusion | 9 Comments

One of the most commonly used ColdFusion tags may also be one of the most misused. I say this because of the ColdFusion code that I've seen in production. It appears that a large number people think that all you need to do is open the CFMail tag and type in a to address the from address a subject and then close the tag. And then stuff your email message between the opening and closing tags. People do it this way as this is how they are shown, see the examples below.

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This entry was posted on May 27, 2010 at 2:30 AM and has received 7850 views. There are currently 9 comments. Print this entry.

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#1 by Mihai Baboi on 5/27/10 - 5:51 AM

Thanks so much for this article. I've been working on a newsletter app (albeit in php) for some time and had no idea about all of this. I'm sure that based on the information here I can find some php equivalent code to make the app better.
#2 by Frank on 5/27/10 - 6:15 AM

Very interesting article. I do a lot of code review and always criticised cfmail tags without using type definition. But I never thought on using cfmailpart, because (you said that already) the examples in the Lifedocs dont' use them too.
Thanks for sharing your code.
#3 by Tony Garcia on 6/2/10 - 7:34 AM

Great post! Thanks for clarifying a few things for me.
#4 by Wil Genovese on 6/2/10 - 2:38 PM

@Frank I'm glad you found my notes useful.

@Tony You're welcome.

@Mihai I'm not sure there is an easy way to do this in PHP. It's been a long time since I coded an email in PHP.
#5 by ED on 9/14/10 - 9:09 AM

Hi Wil,
Thanks for this article, it's very useful. I'm running into another issue where I want to have special characters in my email subject. Right now they're html characters and in the text of the message they're displaying properly, so I believe the encoding by CF is correct, but in the subject, it's not getting encoded. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
#6 by Keith on 9/28/10 - 12:29 AM

Where exactly does the cfsavecontent and cffunction bricks go? I tried
to make a test but get data content error or some such
#7 by Wil Genovese on 9/28/10 - 12:33 AM

@keith if you are just going to do a single file then place the code blocks in the same order in which they appear in this blog post. cffunction, cfsavecontent, cfmail.
#8 by Rick Shimko on 1/14/11 - 1:58 PM

Dumb question. Is there a way to attach a file to the email from the
client's machine? Please advise.
#9 by Wilgeno on 1/26/11 - 3:09 PM

@Rick - Not a dumb question. Yes, it can be done, you need to use a multipart form and upload the file from the clients machine to your server then use the code above to attach the file tot he email.