Send Email Directly from your Website

As you build better and more functional websites, you might find yourself thinking about how cool it would be to be able to send emails directly from your website. Or you might find that it's more of a requirement than a novelty.

Most business related websites automatically generate emails at certain times. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to generate emails directly from your website. Here are some examples:

• You might send users a welcome message when they register with your website.
• Your website might automatically send a regular newsletter to subscribers.
• Your website could have a feedback form that enables users to contact you. This form could automatically generate an email to you the user submits it.
• You could configure a notification/alert email to be sent to you whenever an error that requires urgent attention is generated.
  
• Your website might have an "Email this article" button.

There are many more reasons you might need to send email directly from your website. Whatever the reason, you'll need to build a script to generate these emails.

Both ColdFusion and PHP make sending mail extremely easy. ColdFusion's CFMail tag makes sending email a breeze, whilst PHP's mail() function is what you need to use on a PHP platform.

If your website still doesn't have any mail functionality, perhaps now's the time to change that!