I've been trying to accomplish this for quite sometime with no success, so I figured I would throw this one out there.

Has anyone ever, using ColdFusion, gotten an UNREAD message mail count from a POP3 or IMAP server?

<cfpop> will only give you a list of all messages in your inbox.

I have read that if you give a LIST command to a POP server it will return a list of messages and each message will have a unique ID. That ID is guaranteed to be unique through different sessions. So if you store a list of IDs on the client side, you can determine if a message is new. And if it is new, it is unread.

But I haven't gone to that extent yet.

Any suggestions?

Let me also extend this..

I use SmarterMail webservices and haven't seen the functionality as far as checking for messages. Can I maybe get the info via a SmarterMail webservice call? (Thinking maybe there are 'undocumented' functions.)

Jason, I once tried to do the same thing. What I found out was that with POP, there is no built-in framework - I would check messages in Thunderbird, but smartermail would still show them as unread. Smartermail uses it's own db. Don't quote me on this, but I believe IMAP supports querying whether it has be read. If you are willing to update to premium mail this could be an option.

Thanks for the tip. I do have premium mail on all my accounts, but unfortunately ColdFusion does not have an IMAP function (where as Blue Dragon has <cfimap> which does what I want)

There is a company that sells a custom tag <cfx_imap> but I'm not about to spend money on it, and I just don't have the time to create one either.

Jason, I guess CF8 might have it, but that could be too long a wait...
What I recommend is that you write a PHP script to do it, or even better, Ruby, if it's installed. If you can do Ruby, I send you a script. I am working on Ruby and IMAP for a script I'm working on called spamsniffer. Here's a simple Tutorial for PHP IMAP: http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/PHP/Create-Your-Own-Mail-Script-With-PHP-and-IMAP/
Thanks, Ben