The CFTRY and CFCATCH method described earlier is a great method for a partial scrub. That method will scrub those email addresses which are malformed or have invalid syntax. That's a great start, but there are two additional things you should do as well:
1. Use the FAILTO feature of the CFMAIL tag and send the failed mail to an alternate return address. This will allow you to identify the mail where the email address has a valid syntax but is undeliverable. Of course, you'll need to parse through the mail to see why it's undeliverable based on the system messages. Some will be hard failures which are undeliverable because the email address is invalid or the account is discontinued. Those are sure fire mails to remove. Others will be soft failures with messages "mailbox full" or "temporarily unable to connect with server". Those are suspect mails and if you keep a history of those, you may see some patterns like a mail box which is always full. After several of those type returns you can probably assume no one is collecting the mail and purge those as well. 2. You should also be sure to provide an "Unsubscribe" option on the mail. I'd assume you are most likely doing that as that's required by the CAN SPAM ACT. You can hook that up to a query so people can just do it themselves with no action needed from you. When sending bulk mail to a mail list it's important that you clean the list of failed mail and provide an opt-out option. Failure to do either could get your mail server blacklisted. and that's a headache you don't want to deal with. A high rate of failed mail and no opt-out feature will get you blacklisted very quickly. If you are going to this a lot, it's also a good idea you allow the mail so spool (cfmail spoolenable="yes") and you may even want to write a trickle program to slow down the outbound mail stream. If you have a bunch a mail going to the same server (or servers) and you're not trickling the mail, the server will try to send a bunch very quickly and your mail server could make multiple connections to the other server. Too many concurrent connections is another thing that's sets of the SPAM alarms and could also get you blacklisted. Lastly, to ensure your mail does not go the SPAM box, be sure you test the content in a SPAM RATING service. There are a lot of filters you can run the mail content through and get a rating telling you how 'spamy' the mail looks. There are a bunch of things they look - various trigger words like FREE, BUY NOW, VIAGRA, etc., malformed HTML, too many pictures and not enough text content, etc. Hope this was helpful. Robert Harrison Full Stack Developer AIMG rharri...@aimg.com Main Office: 704-321-1234 ext.118 Direct Line: 516-302-4345 www.aimg.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:360359 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
