Ben Nadel © 2008.
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I have never done anything mail related with ColdFusion other than sending mail using ColdFusion's CFMail tag. After years of this, I think it's finally time to start making this a two way street - healthy relationships are all about give AND take. I want to start looking into ColdFusion's CFPOP tag to see how I can get mail off a server and thereby, open up an automated bidirectional line of communication using the pop mail server as the go-between.
Before I could even start looking into ColdFusion CFPop, I had to get a mail server that could handle non-SSL POP3 support. I can't use my gMail accounts because apparently they use SSL which ColdFusion cannot yet handle (as of CF8). So, I did a quick Google search for "Free Pop mail" and came across the site Lavabit. This site seems perfect for testing. Their FREE, basic account offers:
This should be more than enough to provide the perfect ColdFusion CFPop testing environment. I would say the setup took about 2 minutes... and did I mention that the basic account is FREE :)
Once I got the mail server setup done, I had to start building my ColdFusion testing environment. I am going to keep this ultra simple while I get my bearings on how all the CFPop stuff works. I set up a simple ColdFusion Application.cfm template:
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Now, all of my testing code can use the centralized REQUEST.Pop configuration information.
Ok, so let's start taking a look at how ColdFusion's CFPop tag works. The CFPop tag has three actions:
GetHeaderOnly and GetAll both receive information from the POP mail server. The Delete action deletes a given message (or list of messages) from the mail server. The reason there are two "get" actions is for performance optimization. The GetHeaderOnly action gets information about the messages but leaves out the attachments and content information that can take more processing and transfer time:
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The email header information that comes back from the server is stored in a standard ColdFusion query object with the following columns:
The To, CC, From, ReplyTo, Subject, and Date fields are pretty self-explanatory. The Header field contains the email header information that seems to have a lot of routing and "behind the scenes" information. The MessageID is some sort of unique identifier that is parsed out of the Header data. The MessageNumber seems to be the sequential "order ID" of the message as it sits in the mail box. The UID seems to be a unique identifier for that message that can be used to filter all of the CFPop actions (GetHeaderOnly, GetAll, and Delete); apparently it is the header's X-UID field, but this field is not present in the Header data.
Note that I am saying "seems to be" on several of these values above because really, I am not 100% where these values come from. This is the first time I am looking into this CFPop stuff, so please don't take this with any sort of authority.
When you use the GetAll action:
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... ColdFusion retrieves all of the above columns plus the following additional content and attachment columns:
The TextBody and the HTMLBody fields contain data from the different parts of the message if different Content Types were supplied (think CFMailPart [type = text/plain or text/html]). Needless to say, Text/Plain goes into the TextBody field and the Text/HTML goes into the HTMLBody field. The Body field always contains the first content part found in the email message (in top-down order). The attachments is a tab delimited list of attached file names and the AttachmentFiles is a tab delimited list of file path corresponding to the file names (the files are downloaded to the ColdFusion server as part of the CFPop action when AttachmentPath is supplied in the CFPop tag). CIDs is a structure that contains the key-value pair data for the embedded images in an HTML email. I have not seen this in action yet, but from the looks of it, the key is the name of the image file and the value is the CID that it corresponds to.
Once we get the email messages from the POP server, we can delete them using the Delete action:
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As you can see here, I am filtering the delete action using the UID attribute. This UID attribute can contain a single value or a comma delimited list of values that correspond to the UID fields in the GetAll and GetHeaderOnly CFPop actions. If you do not supply some sort of filtering UID (exclude the UID attribute in the CFPop tag), then all of the emails on the server will be deleted.
Ok, so that's like a birds eye view of the ColdFusion CFPop tag. Please don't look at this as a tutorial; this was mostly a gathering of notes for myself. There is a lot that can be done here, but I think the premise is fairly simple. Now, I just need to come up with a really cool idea that will help me learn how to fully utilize this functionality. My first instinct is to integrate this with some SMS text messaging through the cellular email gateways... but that's another post, and another adventure.
Links for my future study:
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Using CFPOP And CFMAIL For Bidirectional SMS Text Messaging In ColdFusion
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The fun part comes when you are trying to render the html body. for instance, Outlook likes to throw a lot of Outlook specific tags in its message body. CID's are sent as attachments. The fun part comes in when you are trying to render the HTMLBody. You get to go in and parse out the CID tags and link it back to the attachment.
I have a sick sense of fun. ;)
Posted by Shane Zehnder on Nov 27, 2007 at 11:16 AM
Nicely done. CFPOP can be a real pain some days - depending on the server you are dealing with. Having an email account you know works with CFPOP is greatly helpful in debugging other email providers.
Posted by WTL on Nov 27, 2007 at 12:22 PM
@Shane,
Good challenges are fun indeed. Nothing sick or twisted about it. I am sure I will build up to doing something cool like that.
@WTL,
I would imagine so. Luckily, this LavaBit.com place seems pretty good. From the testing I have done, it seems snappy enough and has not shown any problems with my action. I haven't messed around with any attachments yet, but so far, so good.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Nov 27, 2007 at 12:28 PM
Ben - as always great explanation. I'd read your blog even if you were writing about CFPOOP and instead of CFPOP.
Posted by Bruce on Nov 27, 2007 at 2:00 PM
@Bruce,
Ha ha ha :) Thanks a lot. I hope I can do some cool stuff with CFPOP. It seems like there is all this potential here that I can run wild in.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Nov 27, 2007 at 2:12 PM
Hi Ben,
you can integrate with gmail probably using IMAP...
read here
http://webtrenches.com/post.cfm/connecting-to-gmail-using-coldfusion
Posted by Anuj Gakhar on Nov 27, 2007 at 5:28 PM
I really look forward to your postings on SMS integration. I've been meaning to set aside some time to research that myself, so if you beat me to it you will save me some time :).
Posted by Taylor Trusty on Nov 27, 2007 at 5:31 PM
Hey Ben, I was just researching CFPOP and SSL tonight when I came across your post. It turns out there is a way to support CFPOP over SSL: just go into the JVM properties and set it to use SSL over the specified port. I learned of this technique by looking at the code in a UDF at
http://cf_sslpop.riaforge.org/
I've found nothing yet to indicate whether CFPOP can be made to work with TLS (although you can make it work with SSL over port 995, although I have no idea whether that's technically using TLS or not).
Posted by Tom Mollerus on Nov 28, 2007 at 9:45 PM
@Tom,
This is interesting. Do you have any idea if it changes the JVM settings for just my page request? Or does that SSL setting stick across pages. I just hesitate to mess with settings that may or may not affect other applications running on the same box.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Nov 29, 2007 at 7:05 AM
@Anuj,
It looks like far more code goes into using IMAP over POP. I will look into IMAP stuff after I get a little more comfortable with the POP world. This is my first foray into the world of "receiving mail" so I want to take it slow.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Nov 29, 2007 at 7:46 AM
@Ben,
Regarding whether changing the javaService's pop3 properties affects other applications or other sessions, the answer is that I think it does, but not in a bad way. After changing the javaService properties to enable SSL in one session (for a connection to a Yahoo! mailbox over port 995), I dumped the same properties in another session (for a connection to my own QMail server over port 110). Both sessions showed the same, new settings with SSL enabled. But cfpop continued to work correctly for both sessions, even though my own server doesn't support SSL.
So let's put it this way-- I think the changes to the java properties do affect other sessions and applications, but my guess is that they only enable the use of SSL. The changes don't seem to make all cfpop calls require SSL.
That being said, I am definitely a noob when it comes to the underlying Java platform. Do share a little uneasiness about this technique, and I would love to hear the opinions of someone who's more of an expert. I'll contact the UDF's author to see if he can shed any light on the discussion.
Posted by Tom Mollerus on Nov 29, 2007 at 9:28 AM
@Tom,
Good point as to the minimal impact. Like you, my only uneasiness is that I don't know much about the underlying Java platform (only some of its classes). I suppose enabling SSL can never really harm other projects.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Nov 29, 2007 at 9:58 AM
You can also use Stunnel. I've been successfully using it for a long time now and was hoping to quit using it in CF8 (with new CFMail SSL/TLS support) but nope... still is needed as CFPOP was left behind.
More here:
http://www.harelmalka.com/?p=64
and here:
http://www.stunnel.org/
Posted by Harel Malka on Jan 7, 2008 at 8:06 PM
@Harel,
Thanks for the tip.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jan 8, 2008 at 7:15 AM