Using ColdFusion with Mail Servers

Adding e-mail to your ColdFusion applications lets you respond automatically to user requests. You can use e-mail in your ColdFusion applications in many different ways. These are just a few examples:

Trigger e-mail messages based on users' requests or orders.
Allow users to request and receive additional information or documents through e-mail.
Confirm customer information based on order entries or updates.
Send invoices or reminders, using information pulled from database queries.

ColdFusion offers several ways to integrate e-mail into your applications. For sending e-mail, you generally use the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). For receiving mail, you use the Post Office Protocol (POP) to retrieve e-mail from the mail server. To use e-mail messaging in your ColdFusion applications, you must have access to an SMTP server and/or a valid POP account.

In your ColdFusion application pages, you use the cfmail and cfpop tags to send and receive mail respectively. The following sections describe ColdFusion e-mail features and offer examples of these tags.

Developing ColdFusion Applications
Sending and Receiving E-mail