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ColdFusion Article

John Cummings

John Cummings
Macromedia, Inc.

Making the Most of E-Mail with the cfmail Tag Enhancements in ColdFusion MX 6.1

Note: Macromedia ColdFusion MX 6.1 is now available for trial and purchase.

One of the challenges that developers had to face with previous releases of Macromedia ColdFusion was finding a way to integrate e-mail functionality reliably into their web applications. While ColdFusion has long included subsystems designed to enable your applications to communicate with mail servers, when the message volume became very high, or the construction of the messages themselves required more advanced formatting techniques (as is the case in multipart e-mail messages), many developers looked beyond ColdFusion to achieve this type of functionality. With the introduction of Macromedia ColdFusion MX 6.1, Macromedia engineering has dramatically improved the performance and the capabilities of the built-in mail framework in ColdFusion.

In this article, I'll discuss the major improvements of the mail functionality in ColdFusion MX 6.1. I'll also discuss how you can use this new functionality to the benefit of your applications.

Download the sample code (TXT)

Enhanced Mail Functionality in ColdFusion MX 6.1

Key enhancements to the mail functionality in ColdFusion MX 6.1 include:

  • Support for the construction and retrieval of multipart e-mail messages.
  • Expanded character set encoding options for constructing e-mail messages.
  • Support for SMTP authentication.
  • Option to specify backup mail servers in ColdFusion Administrator (Enterprise Edition).
  • An enhanced mail handler that, as Macromedia lab tests have shown, has been able to handle a volume of over 1,000,000 e-mail messages per hour (Enterprise Edition).
  • Enhanced mail spooling options.

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About the author

John Cummings is a principal engineer for Macromedia ColdFusion Product Support. In addition to his role at Macromedia, he frequently writes about Macromedia technology and speaks at user groups and conferences.

 

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