E-dreamz Company Blog

I've always lamented that sending mail in PHP, especially HTML formatted email, is a major pain. With ColdFusion is probably one of the simplest things you can do. Let's look at sending the email both with PHP and with ColdFusion

ColdFusion

<cfmail to="email@edreamz.com" from="email@edreamz.com" subject="Hey What's Up?">
<cfmailpart type="text">
Hi!, I'm the plain text portion of an email sent from ColdFusion.
Do you want to hang out this weekend?
Thanks,
ColdFusion Mailer
</cfmailpart>
<cfmailpart type="html">
Hi!,
<p> I'm the HTMLtext portion of an email sent from ColdFusion. Do you want to hang out this weekend? </p>
Thanks,<br />
<strong>ColdFusion Mailer</strong>
</cfmailpart>
</cfmail>

PHP

<?php
$email = "testing@edreamz.com";
$subject = "This is the Email Subject";
$message = "This is my email message";
mail($email, $subject, $message, "From: $email");
?>

Now one thing to note is that I have to repeat the mail() line for each PHP recipient, but for ColdFusion, I just use a comma seperated list: ex: to="email1@edreamz.com, email2@edreamz.com"

Now there are 3rd party libraries out there, for example: PHPMailer, that makes sending mail with PHP a little less painful. But the cool thing to me is that ColdFusion can do all this out of the box. No configuration, no third party library. Plus I'm not even touching on the fact that you can give the mail tag in ColdFusion a query and it will automatically loop over the query and send email to those in the query.

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