
Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Sending and Receiving E-Mail > Receiving e-mail messages

Receiving e-mail messages

You create ColdFusion pages to access a Post Office Protocol (POP) server to retrieve e-mail message information. ColdFusion can then display the messages (or just header information), write information to a database, or perform other actions.

The cfpop tag lets you add Internet mail client features and e-mail consolidation to applications. Although a conventional mail client provides an adequate interface for personal mail, there are many cases in which an alternative interface to some mailboxes is advantageous. You use cfpop to develop targeted mail clients to suit the specific needs of a wide range of applications. The cfpop tag does not work with the other major e-mail protocol, Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP).

Here are three instances in which implementing POP mail makes sense:

If your site has generic mailboxes that are read by more than one person (sales@yourcompany.com), it can be more efficient to construct a ColdFusion mail front end to supplement individual user mail clients.
In many applications, you can automate mail processing when the mail is formatted to serve a particular purpose; for example, when subscribing to a list server.
If you want to save e-mail messages to a database.

Using cfpop on your POP server is like running a query on your mailbox contents. You set its action attribute to retrieve either headers (using the GetHeaderOnly value) or entire messages (using the GetAll value) and assign it a name value. You use the name to refer to the record set that cfpop returns, for example, when using cfoutput. To access a POP server, you also must define the server, username, and password attributes.

For more information on cfpop syntax and variables, see CFML Reference.


Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Sending and Receiving E-Mail > Receiving e-mail messages

Version 6.1

Comments are no longer accepted for ColdFusion MX 6.1. ColdFusion 8 is the current version.

Comments

Buckshot2 said on Jul 4, 2004 at 5:39 PM :

Is there any way of importing email into cold fusion that's encoded in chinese gb2312, big 5, etc ? The webmail app that I've created works fine for anything that's encoded using utf-8, but when I try to import messages in gb2312 I get rubish returned. If cfpop can't perform this sort of functionality I think it's a major oversight on macromedia's behalf.

hokugawa said on Jul 6, 2004 at 7:55 AM :

cfpop will choose proper encoding automatically by email headers. Could you check that gb2312 encoded email has proper email headers?

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