MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX, Develop Manual

Page: 796 / 860

796 Chapter 35: Sending and Receiving E-Mail
Adding a custom header to a message
When the recipient of an e-mail message replies to the message, the reply is sent to the address
specified in the From field of the original message. You can use
cfmailparam
to override the value
in the From field and provide a Reply-To e-mail address. Using
cfmailparam
, the reply to the
following example is addressed to widget_master@YourCompany.com:
<cfmail from="jacob@YourCompany.com"
to="daniel@MyCompany.com"
subject="Requested Files">
<cfmailparam name="Reply-To" value="widget_master@YourCompany.com">
Dan,
Thanks very much for the sending the widget press release and graphic.
I’m now the company’s Widget Master and am accepting e-mail at
widget_master@YourCompany.com.
See you at Widget World 2002!
Jake
</cfmail>
Note: You can combine the two uses of cfmailparam within the same ColdFusion page. Write a
separate cfmailparam tag for each header and for each attached file.
Advanced sending options
The ColdFusion implementation of SMTP mail uses a spooled architecture. When an application
page processes a
cfmail
tag, the messages that are generated are not sent immediately. Instead,
they are spooled to disk and processed in the background. This architecture has two advantages:
•
End users of your application are not required to wait for SMTP processing to complete before
a page returns to them. This design is especially useful when a user action causes more than a
handful of messages to be sent.
•
Messages sent using
cfmail
are delivered reliably, even in the presence of unanticipated events
like power outages or server crashes.
You can set how frequently ColdFusion MX checks for spooled mail on messages on the Mail/
Mail Logging page of the ColdFusion MX Administrator Server tab. (The default interval is 60
seconds.) If ColdFusion is extremely busy or has a large existing queue of messages, however,
delivery can occur after the spool interval.
Sending mail as HTML
Most newer Internet mail applications are capable of reading and interpreting HTML code in a
mail message. The
cfmail
tag lets you specify the message type as HTML. The
type="HTML"
attribute (the only valid value; the default is plain text) informs the receiving e-mail client that the
message contains embedded HTML tags that must be processed. This feature is useful only when
you are sending messages to mail clients that can interpret HTML. Also, you must escape any
pound signs in the HTML, such as those used to specify colors, by using two # characters; for
example,
bgcolor="##C5D9E5"
.