ColdFusion Muse

Interesting Mail Headers

My good friend Jake Churchill was surfing dev shed and he found this post regarding cfmail. The question is pretty easy, but one of the comments further down caught his eye. A user named mackindlays makes the statement that "Many mail services bounce CF generated mails now". Personally I do not believe there is any evidence that mail servers bounce CF generated mail any more than .NET generated mail or PHP generated mail etc. Perhaps mail servers score mail that is obviously sent from a web server as "more likely to be spam". Certainly that was a contention of my previous post on the subject. At any rate, his solution was to spoof the mail headers for Microsoft Exchange using CFMAILPARAM.

I have no idea if this will work or be successful (I'll let my readers know what I find out). But this rather un-muse like solution is perhaps one more arrow in the quiver of folks trying to send legitimate email.

Solving an Email Send Problem: a Simple, Innovative Approach

Getting email to go through for your customer or newsletter can be tricky these days. An email has to work pretty hard to make it through all the barriers in its way. The problem is compounded when you have an automated email system like a newsletter or marketing apparatus. Even if you follow all the rules you may still achieve a marginal success rate. One of our customers (Tom Long of digbro.com) has a unique system for marketing that is clearly not spam. It involves users sending individual emails out to customers with whom they already have a relationship. It's not bulk email and there are clear opt out instructions. The email goes out in a small trickle of a few hundred an hour. The system tracks the lead internally and an elaborate reporting system allows the user to figure out success rates, run referral programs and keep track of the customer information.

In spite of the benign nature of this system it has still been difficult getting emails out to some domains - particularly large email domains like Yahoo and Hotmail. We have done some innovative things like creating a "scoring" system that utilizes calls to spam assassin to try and "rate" the email before it is sent. The user submits his email text, the system dummies up an email, pipes it to Spam Assassin, retrieves it back and extracts the score - all before the email is sent. Pretty nifty - but not a panacea. In spite of our best efforts the success rate to known good email addresses on larger email domains improved only marginally. This customer is one of those visionary men that simply can't help thinking outside the box. Check out his solution.

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Interesting Loop for Dates and Times

Now my readers know that I've seen enough Coldfusion code in my day that I can quote some livedoc articles verbatim (including the notes and comments). It takes a great deal to surprise me with something new. But here's a snippet I found the other day that made me sit up and take notice. The fact that it uses CFLOOP (one of the most ho-hum of all the CF tags) is even more surprising. This is a loop that iterates over time increments. You can use it to create incremental time objects that are n number of minutes or seconds apart. It doesn't look like you might expect either. Here is an example that loops from 8 to 5 in 45 minute intervals:

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Troubleshooting CFHTTP - 3 Tips

Hang around ColdFusion long enough and you will eventually find yourself making use of CFHTTP. The tag allows you to make an HTTP request from your Coldfusion server to an HTTP resource. Why would you want to do this? HTTP is a great low level protocol for data exchange. There's a reason why most web services run over HTTP - it is easy to understand and implement. As for CFHTTP, there are a great many examples, but here are a few.

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Virtual Sites and "Host Headers" Explained

Some web developers never bother to learn the nitty gritty stuff that makes up the Internet. I've seen very bright programmers who don't know the difference between a GET request and a POST request (or why they should care). In your journey through the IT landscape it would behoove you to pick up a few tips on how the web actually works. In my view you should know the basics of how a web server and browser work together to deliver content. You should know how to setup a web site in IIS or Apache, and you should know when to use a GET and when to use a POST. It also wouldn't hurt to learn about IP addressing, routing, classless subnets, ARP Caching, application pools, JVM Garbage collection, the theory of relativity and the meaning of life.... but I digress.

Among the items I find myself explaining over and over is the concept of a "HOST Header" and how it's used on a web server. Like many of my blog posts this one is intended to help me so I can point to it and not have to repeat myself. Now to be fair, this topic is one I sometimes have to cover with customers and site owners who need to know the difference between a dedicated IP address and a "virtual site". Either way, here's a run down of "virtual sites" and "host headers".

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