On 8/2/06, Andrew Scott wrote: > I am a little curious why you would suggest to not put it all into the To: > field?
Well, the most basic argument against the practice is that antispam systems see that and its a red flag. I know I set my own mail servers to limit recipients on a single email message and I'm sure I'm not alone. With that said, I have never personally used an antispam system or gateway that scores this as a criteria. If nobody else knows of one perhaps its just a legend. Nonetheless I don't think its a sound practice when there are far better -- and I would argue correct -- tools available at your disposal. What are you going to do... find the max string length you your server can handle in the To and then pull a query and stuff in as many addresses as you can? Then do it over again and again? Thats a lot of work to mail a simple list and the only benefit is you are reducing the number of cfmail statements... a benefit that I don't see the point of to be honest. Especially when you could just use CFMAIL's query attribute (although it doesn't allow you to do individual try/catch). I would argue that a best practice would be to loop over a query that contains your email data. Inside the loop is a try/catch block and inside *that* is a cfmail statement. If the try/catch fails (and failure can come from more than just a bad address) then the catch should report the error and the errored record ID for altternate or future action, and move on to mailing the next record. Once you get past that, the next thing I would argue -- and while I don't think the above is really in question as the best way to go, I can see some arguing against what I say next -- is that you need to SLOW DOWN the mail delivery. Regardless of the capacities of your software and hardware, we live in a world where any more than a few dozen emails shot out of a given server at a given moment arouses deep suspicion on the part of destination mail servers, who will happily throw a temporary block on your sending server for 20-60 minutes to see if you come back. Often the response is an RFC-noncompliant 'no such user here' and I am not talking about greylisting, which would present no problem to a respectable mail server. Next would be the issue of load on the server. ColdFusion arguably has solved all of its mail capacity problems but I still keep hearing about limitations on shared servers. And in that environment lets say you can get 200 addresses into a To field. That may or may not be slow enough for the shared mail server (big maybe) and from what I have seen it is definitely too much for you to miss getting hit by a frequency filter for very long. Sooner or later you will -- out of sheer chance -- send too many emails to one network and they will block you. So you have to slow down the loop. i.e. throttle it. You could use a java-based sleep function, which uses less resources than a ghastly timed cfloop, but it still eats a thread and that in and of itself can be a problem. I use the simple, low-tech HTML refresh method (which with a little effort you can run as a scheduled process via the Windows scheduler). My mailings on shared and dedicated servers alike have long been invisible to frequency blocks or load issues on a shared server thanks to trickling. Its a set-it-up-and-forget-it solution. I wrote a version with try-catch built in and posted it in the tutorial area with a couple others at that same site this afternoon. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Janitor, MSB Web Systems mysecretbase.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:248694 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
