Here is what I've learned over the past week on this topic (talk about a timely posting). I have a simple app that I use to send email blasts to my neighbors about neighborhood events, etc. There is a database with the emails (about 150 records), and I just loop over it and do a CFMAIL to send each address the message. This has been working for years, and got around all the problems usually associated with sending a message directly from a desktop client to a long list of addressees (looks like spam to both the sending SMTP server and to the receiving server, etc.).
Until last week. I sent out a blast, and about an hour later my outgoing SMTP connection for Outlook (which is the same SMTP server that I have CF configured for), stopped working - it was getting a login failure when it tried to send out my desktop messages. I called the ISP tech support, they couldn't find any problem, reset my password, and everything started working again. Until yesterday. I sent out another blast, and the same thing happened. The proverbial light when on above my head. I called tech support, but this time their resetting of the password didn't work, and I also noticed that the error message from Outlook was not the login failure, but a "domain has been blacklisted" message. The tech support guy looked into it, and sure enough, those split-second blasts of 150 emails from the CF app triggered the ISP's spam-bot detection. Nothing to do but to wait for it to time-out and decide I'm a good guy after all (unless I run that CF app again!), or until Monday morning when the security guys get to work and manually fix it. Good news is that after about 12 hours it seems to have de-blacklisted me. So the moral of the story is that you definitely need to be careful about throttling this kind of activity. Like I said, this worked for me for years (with the same ISP), and I didn't recently add any new addresses to the database. The ISP isn't going to be very forthcoming with details on something like this, but they obviously lowered the threshold on their end of how much outbound SMTP traffic can take place in a short timespan. I need to modify my emailer app to not send them all at once. That needs to be coordinated with the CF Admin MAIL settings. The delay interval between executing a batch of CFMAIL tags has to be a multiple of the mail polling interval set in CF Admin. I'm running on my own box, so I know what that interval is, but if you're using a shared hosting service then you're going to have to experiment to deduce what they have their polling interval set to - the default is 15 seconds (or you could call them and ask). The CF shared hosting configs that I've worked with always had it set to something higher, like 5 or 10 minutes. I ran into this with just 150 addresses, so you should be able to see what level of complexity you're going to run into with the massive quantity you're talking about. Good luck! -reed ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology-Michael-Dinowitz/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:336100 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
