[thelist] tip: LF problem with SMTP/CFMAIL

Oliver Lineham oliver at lineham.co.nz
Mon Jan 29 17:47:41 CST 2001


Hi,

This was going to be a question. But I've solved it. So now it's a:

<tip type="SMTP">
When writing something that sends email, you need to take care that *all* 
lines end with carriage return + linefeed pairs (CRLFs) not bare LFs or CRs.

Otherwise, although the email will be received by most servers just fine, 
*some* will bounce (including msn.com apparently), with the following 
message from the destination mail server:

451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.

If you follow that link, you will find a document explaining that the 
message contained bare line feeds (LFs) instead of the SMTP standard CRLF.

If you encounter this problem while using ColdFusion's CFMAIL tag, it's 
because you have saved the file in UNIX text format (which doesn't use 
CRLF) and need to resave it in PC text format (which does). CFMAIL sends 
the body byte-for-byte to the mail server, and doesn't do any translation 
of LFs.
</tip>


</ol>

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