I've used ColdFusion for sending text emails for years. I'm now interested in learning how to send those pretty emails you see from companies like Mint.
Anyone know of a good ColdFusion tutorial to teach me how to make this work and not get hit by bugs or spam filters?
What do you mean by "pretty" - HTML based? CF supports html email. Just use type="html". You can also use cfmailpart to send both text and html versions of the same content.
Here's a good article on making HTML email using CSS:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters
Ray's answer is right on the money about the CF part, but most of making this work is about HTML, CSS and testing testing testing.
As Ray said, ColdFusion supports HTML email, which is how you make an email "pretty". A quick down and dirty sample looks like this:
<cfmail from="[email protected]" to="[email protected]" subject="Check this out!" type="HTML">
<HTML>
<head><title>My Email</title>
</head>
<body>
<!--- Style Tag in the Body, not Head, for Email --->
<style type="text/css">
body { font-size: 14px; }
</style>
This is the text of my email.
</body>
</HTML>
</cfmail>
That's it, you've just sent an email. Notice how there is nothing preventing you from sticking in any old from email address you like? That leads me to my next point, in which you're wondering how to avoid getting hit by Spam filters:
The short answer is: You can't.
Oh sure, you can do intelligent things, like not including the word "VIAGRA" in your email (unless you're trying to send out penile enlargement emails and want to know how to get past spam filters, in which case I'm disinclined to help), but let's assume you just want to avoid obvious pitfalls.
I can think of two things that might help:
Send out email from a domain registered to the from email address. I didn't make the rules, but this one can be a pain. Ie., If you try to send out proxy emails for myorg.com, and your server does not host myorg.com, some spam filters are going to block it. What is usually done is to apply some branding to the from email, like this:
<cfmail from="MyOrg.Com <[email protected]>" replyto="[email protected]" to="[email protected]" subject="Test" type="HTML">
</cfmail>
In this case the email is sent from your server at registeredsite.com, with a replyto being the proxy email address. Spam filters will probably be okay with this, since the from email address of *@registeredsite.com resolves to your server. Try to send out with [email protected] in the from, and you'll definitely run into some places that will block you.
Even if you take these precautions, however, you'll run into a situation where someone gets a hold of your domain name and drags it through the mud. They'll send out thousands of emails to the internet in your name--or rather, in your domain's name--and because of the insecurity of email, your domain will get added to someone's blacklist after a thousand occurrences of [email protected] hit the sysadmin's inbox. There's nothing you can do about it, either.
Or you can decide to run a cloud app and use a remote mail server. But some jokers will get one look at the originator being EC2 and will say, "Nope, sorry. Denied." They don't care about the legitimacy of your organization, only the origin of the email.
Email is an antiquated technology that has been rushed into mass usage before we really were able to think of a better protocol. As a protocol, it's terrible....and yet we're stuck with it, for backwards compatibility reasons. You cannot possibly avoid the spam filter. 95% of the email on the internet is junk mail, and never even reaches the intended recipient. Just absorb the enormity of that statistic for a moment, and pull your ideas back to reality. Many of the spam-prevention techniques being used today are unnecessarily aggressive, and create a great many 'false positives'. You can shoot for, say 80% of your email being sent, but what it really comes down to is this: As soon as the email has been fired off, it's completely out of your control. You can only take responsibility for so much.
I would start by finding an HTML template email that you like. Then you put it in the tags with the type set to html as mentioned above. You might want to consider doing the multipart email to handle plaintext (and blackberry) users.
Might wanna check out this ebook from mailchimp. Email apps render HTML in some crazy ways, so be prepared to use tables for layout. http://downloads.mailchimp.com/guides/Monkey_Style_Email_Jitsu.pdf
And I would add to this all that you can check whether a mail will be displayed correctly and whether it will get hit by a spamfilter or not by going to a website that is called litmusapp. You can send your test newsletter to one of their emailaddresses and then they will give you screenshots of how each newsletter will look like in each type of emailclient. Also it checks the newsletter against a few popular spamblockers and gives you advice on what to change.
I subscribe to the Campaign Monitor Newsletter & they also have a list of very useful articles here: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/