Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

Last night I figured out to use CDO in Active Server Pages to use a remote server to send out e-mail through. This allows us to build web applications on a dedicated web server and send out mail through our “trusted” mail server.

This is most useful for mail servers like “AOL” which only allow mail from SMTP servers which have a “reverse DNS” setup. If you don’t use a trusted SMTP server, AOL will reject all of the mail that you send to it. This is a known security measure that AOL has had in place for many years.

On a positive note, I did make some improvements to our mailing list application. We can now send multi-part e-mails containing both an HTML and text message. Depending on the mail reader that the client uses, the proper format will be shown to the user. This should go a long ways towards creating and maintaining powerful e-mail campaigns.