August 3, 2007

<cfmail> failto only accepts a single address?

I’m getting some new production servers setup at the moment and I have a single ColdFusion application ready to go on one of them.

Part of the setup was of course getting an SMTP server going, to test this I used a simple ColdFusion script with a cfmail tag. I was receiving the email successfully so all was good…until I tested sending emails as part of my application flow, no email :(

Basically I had something in my project which I didn’t have in my test script, that being multiple failto recipients.

<cfmail to="#to#" from="#from#" subject="my subject" server="#server#" failto="sample1@sample.com,sample2@sample.com">
message body
</cfmail>

Note the multiple ‘failto’ recipients: failto=“sample1@sample.com,sample2@sample.com”

No emails were being sent with the above code and it wasn’t until I removed the 2nd failto address that I started getting emails.

failto="sample1@sample.com"

This seems strange as I can have many to or from recipients, just not failto! The docs say:

“Address to which mailing systems should send delivery failure notifications. Sets the mail envelope reverse-path value.”

This doesn’t seem to say either way to me whether you can only have 1 or multiple addresses here.

I tested this on both ColdFusion 7.0.2 and ColdFusion 8 Standard versions running on Windows Server SMTP.

Has anyone successfully sent email with with multiple failto’s?

© Michael Sharman 2017