@Zackster To answer your question - I think you were getting 404 because you don’t have access to my GCP project sandbox1-187518: so it can’t find it (= 404). curl -v showed the unescaped colon in the URL. My brain assumed it was escaping it behind the scenes or something so I was manually trying escaped or not-escaped urls in cfhttp . But what I needed to do was tell cfhttp to NOT escape the URL!
Anyway - thank you so much for laying out the parsing!! I was finally understanding your proxy suggestion and was setting up https://mitmproxy.org/ and wrestling thru aligning certs when you posted your work.
Thanks again 