CFMail with catchall email addresses

Question

I can't believe I've never noticed this before, but it seems that CFMail won't send to an email address that isn't explicitly set up on the destination mailserver.

This means that if I'm using '[email protected]' and have that set up to catch all email on the domain, CFMail won't send to '[email protected]'.

This causes a massive amount of problems for me, as I'm using CFMail to send out order confirmations, member activations and all manner of other bits and pieces.

Whatever your views on using catchall addresses, it can't be denied that people do use them So, in any case that a user enters a made-up address into one of my sites, they won't receive their email.

There must, simply MUST be a way around this - can anyone help?

For refernece, the message that appears in the logs when sending to a catchall address is 'Invalid Addresses'.

EDIT: Here's the CFMail syntax I'm using -

<cfmail to="#Arguments.sEmailAddress#" from="#Application.sAppEmailAddress#" subject="Stock reminder confirmation: #Local.qGetProductDetails.sProductName# - #Application.sCompanyName#" type="HTML" server="#Application.sAppEmailServer#" username="#Application.sAppEmailAddress#" password="#Application.sAppEmailPassword#">

Translates into:

<cfmail to="[email protected]" from="[email protected]" subject="Stock reminder confirmation: Some product - My Company" type="HTML" server="mail.mydomainname.com" username="[email protected]" password="XXXXXX">

All works fine for [email protected] but not for [email protected].

Important to note of course, that the catch-all is working correctly in all other respects, test emails from mail clients work perfectly.

Answer 1

Can I see your CFMAIL tag setup? CFMAIL doesn't care as long as the email address is properly formatted.

Answer 2

Its not ColdFusion that cares about email validity, its the SMTP server. CF only cares about well formed email addresses.

If you initiated a telnet session to your mail server and tried to use the same address, I'm sure it would have the same result.

Debugging tips for SMTP Connectivity: http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2004/11/22/debug-smtp

Answer 3

Urgh!

Turns out it was an issue with the server. For some reason, catchall email accounts serverwide had stopped working properly. After an email to my hosting provider, it's all working fine with no code changes.

They're somewhat cagey as to what caused the issue, and I was still able to use an email client to send mail out to the addresses...

Thanks for the help in any case. ;)