Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1: Getting Started

Creating Automated POP Agents

You can create automated agents that watch for new messages in a particular mailbox and respond to the messages in some kind of intelligent way. First, you create an agent template, which is just an ordinary ColdFusion template that checks a mailbox and performs whatever type of automatic processing is necessary. This template shouldn’t contain any forms or links, because it won’t be viewed by any of your users. Then, using the ColdFusion scheduler, you schedule the template to be visited automatically every ten minutes, or whatever interval you feel is appropriate.

Creating the Agent Template

Listing 21.11 creates a simple version of a typical agent template: an unsubscribe agent, which responds to user requests ...