Sending Emails Through Connect

OL Connect Professional Workflow
1

Hi

What’s the suggested solution for sending mass emails using connect? I can see we could do it by creating HTML within designer and then sending to the SMTP plugin in workflow but this is a very inefficient way when most email providers offer an API solution which is much quicker than using SMTP

Thanks

James

2

For this you would need to use the Render Email Content task and for example the SendGrid connector. The latter needs to be installed separatly and can be downloaded from the following page: Resource Center | Objectiflune

Erik

3

Hi Erik

Thanks I’ll take a look at the plugin, but we actually use mailgun however though so not sure this will work.

Thanks

James

4

Ok, that complicates things a little bit, to inspire you below an outline of what happens underwater:

The Render Email Content returns information about the generated messages in MetaData (or JSON). In MetaData a ‘document’ is created for every message. The MetaData contains a property called “_vger_prop_folder” which refers to the content of the message in Connect’s File Store. The MetaData also contains information like: to, from, cc, subject etc.

image
image804×598 13.9 KB

Our Sendgrid (and Mailjet) plugin iterates over the documents in the MetaData and fetches the respective content by calling the REST API of the OL Connect Server. Subsequently the plugin constructs the message following the SendGrid API and submits the data to the SendGrid API.

You could use “_vger_prop_folder” in the File Store - Download File tasks to fetch the content in zip format. Alternatively interact with the OL Connect Server API from a Run Script (not sure if you are up for that). In that case you could download the html body in a single request by concatenating “_vger_prop_folder” and “_vger_prop_body”.

Hope this helps,

Erik

1 Like
5

Hi - is the Sendgrid or Mailjet plugins the same concept as Mandrill? I have an email that I need to send out to 65,133 EE’s. This is the largest list I have ever has to send. I want to make sure I do it the most efficient way. I currently use Mandrill. Should I use the Render Email Content instead of Create Email Content?

Thanks

6

I assume you previously used the Create Email Content step with Mandrill (via SMTP). I see no reason to alter that setup. The Render Email Content task generates emails but requires an Email Service Provider-specific task for sending messages. Currently, such tasks exist only for Sendgrid and Mailjet, not for Mandrill. These ESP tasks send messages directly to their respective services via APIs, which generally results in faster delivery compared to SMTP. Some customers have opted for smaller batches when using SMTP due to the protocol’s higher overhead.

7

Thank you - I wanted to make sure I was doing my emails efficiently.