Tom Mollerus' Weblog

I've posted an update and a fix to my EmailParse.CFC today:

• The quoted-printable parsing for text and html body parts has been corrected. When you use EmailParse.CFC to forward an email, you can't tell CF that a mailpart is encoded with quoted-printable or Base-64. So, these mailparts need to be converted back to text in order to forward them correctly.
  
  
• The parsing mechanism has been updated so that the values of the "Received" header, which often is often repeated several times in one email head, are aggregated in one property of the component. Previously, each instance of the Received header would overwrite the previous one, leaving only the last one for you to work with once the parsing was done.

You can read more about my email-parsing code for ColdFusion in the EmailParse.CFC Project area.

The team at FreshView, makers of the fantastic CampaignMonitor application, announced the Email Standards Project last week. The project "works with the design community and email client developers to improve web standards support in email", which is a fantastic goal. As an author of two web-based email clients, I can attest to the frustration of how standards implementation differs widely between different browsers. They've even created their own acid test for web standards compatibility, and it's curious to see that GMail rates a "Poor" score in their test.

Check out the project site at http://www.email-standards.org/

In a previous post, I noted Ashwin Matthew's technique of calling CF from a command-line interface with the use of cURL. This idea got me thinking. Using cURL to pass URL parameters to a script is well and good if you are manually typing the calls, but... what if you want to automate the process and and pass dynamic data whenever a certain event happens on your server?

For instance, I often write PHP scripts to automatically handle responses to certain emails that have been sent in to our company. Emails containing unsubscribe requests are processed so that the corresponding email is removed from our newsletter list; support requests get an autoresponse and are passed on to certain personnel; and I've even written a script for a web-based project management site that redistributed any email it received to a dynamic list of project members. All of these tasks happened automatically, as soon as our mail server received an email. Now I've figured out how to do the same thing with ColdFusion-- and this will work without event gateways and even if your mail server is separate from your web server.

• Distributing emails to a dynamic, user-defined list of recipients;
• Handling unsubscribe requests and subsequent feedback;
• Auto-responding to support requests to let the user know their email has been received;
• Parsing email campaign bouncebacks and marking hard bounces as bad email addresses, and;
• Adding senders to a newsletter recipient list.

Fortunately, PHP fits nicely into the role of a scripting language which can talk to your application databases (to get user data), generate emails, and be called as a command-line interface by your mail program. That's the most important part-- many web languages support reading and sending emails and talking to your database, but few are accessible both as application servers and as command-line programs. I'll explain how to write such a script next.