Chapter 11. Working with Email

When developing applications with ColdFusion, you can leverage the power of email to enable you to communicate directly with your users. This can be a great enhancement to the overall power of your application, and everything you need to make it work is built in to the ColdFusion engine. This makes email functionality easy to implement in to sites built with ColdFusion.

By adding email functionality to your applications, you can streamline many processes. Email functionality enables your application to automatically respond to requests made by users, provide automated updates on account or order status, send requested files or other attachments, generate automated reminders, and provide a host of other great user-experience enhancements.

By using the tools built in to the ColdFusion engine, you can both send and receive email directly from your application.

In this chapter, we discuss the multiple ways in which you can use ColdFusion to create, read, send, receive, manage, and manipulate email messages. We also touch on some ways that you can improve the out-of-the-box performance that you typically see when using the built-in mailer components.