Transact SMTP

It will receive SMTP messages from a customer MTA and automatically sends out the message; your system then sends the original messages with the addition of only an x-header, and no changes to the message workflow.

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This document describes an application for executing certain functions of Acoustic Campaign Transact SMTP.

This guide assists you with automating email interactions between your current system and Acoustic Campaign Transact SMTP. You should have knowledge of Acoustic Campaign.

The Transact SMTP server (Mail Transfer Agent or MTA) supports standard SMTP and MIME formats. Some familiarity with email protocols may be helpful to review, such as:

• SMTP protocols
• MIME protocols

If you need support related to the use of this application, contact Support.

Generally, usage of the Acoustic Campaign application is governed by the same terms and conditions as set forth in your Acoustic Campaign Transact SMTP License Agreement or Acoustic Campaign Services Agreement (an Agreement). Usage of Acoustic Campaign Transact SMTP is strictly prohibited unless you have a valid, unexpired Agreement in place.

You shall not (i) license, sublicense, sell, resell, transfer, assign, distribute or otherwise commercially exploit or make available to any third party Transact SMTP in any way; or (ii) reverse engineer or access Transact SMTP in order to (a) build a competitive product or service, (b) build a product using similar ideas, features, functions or graphics, or (c) copy any ideas, features, functions or graphics, except with Acoustic Campaign's prior written approval in each instance. Licenses cannot be shared or used by more than one individual.

The application uses the original messages from your system. Features include:

• Rapid Acoustic Campaign delivery
• Robust error recovery
• Acoustic Campaign features such as Link Tracking, Databases, email Templates, and Transactional Messages
• Fully customized messages at the point of origin or added content using Acoustic Campaign Templates

Transact SMTP and Acoustic Campaign are independently operating programs and servers. Transact uses Acoustic Campaign databases, Acoustic Campaign email templates, Acoustic Campaign transactional messages, and Acoustic Campaign tracking. Information must be synchronized between the two programs.

Acoustic Campaign saves the From Name, From Address, and Subject fields to the database after each email. These saved fields make it easier for the user to see the emails received based on the From Name, From Address, and Subject.

If you make a change in Acoustic Campaign, such as adding a database, changing a template, creating a transactional message group, or adding an IP address for submitting messages, allow up to 10 - 15 minutes for Transact to become aware of these changes.

Best Practices

The following Best Practices come from user experience and help bring you the results that you expect. These practices can also help expanding to more transactional message groups and make tracking easier to accomplish.

Create a separate transactional message group for the following circumstances:

• Separate reporting for different types of emails
• Changes in body type
• Changes in IP address

Create and encode the email headers correctly

This ensures that Transact can determine the contents of the original message.

• X-headers
• From address
• Reply-to address

See 'What are the best practices for Message Header Encoding?' for more information.

If there is a server farm or load balanced environment, you need to identify all IP addresses and use a separate transactional message group as a 'catchall.' This ensures that Acoustic Campaign delivers messages even if a header is not recognized.

Before beginning the provisioning process, Acoustic Campaign Client Provisioning Services can ask you to send a sample of your email after your system delivers it to a Gmail account. This allows Acoustic Campaign to evaluate the email source for:

• Email body type
• Email encoding character set
• From and Reply address information

Set up and test templates and transactional message groups for each email body type

• HTML
• Text
• Text as HTML
• Multipart

Using x-headers is the most efficient way to establish transactional message group matching.

Transact SMTP supports the following content:

• Transactional message group set matching methods, such as:
• X-header (best practice)
• From address plus Subject (static part of Subject line)
• IP address

Note: An organization should have one transactional message group set to use the IP address for identification as a "catch all," so if matching does not occur with the other methods, Transact still sends the message.

• Transact SMTP allows you to specify up to 10 contacts in the To: field in your email. Previously, Transact only recognized the first contact and ignored all others. Transact SMTP cycles through your contacts and send the same message body to each contact individually. The noted difference is that a unique message is sent to each contact, and none of them sees any other contacts (or their email addresses).
• Custom domain configuration
• Delivery and undeliverable features
• Link tracking: Track links that exist in the email body
• Message content
  • You can send all MIME-supported message content directly in the message body
  • Acoustic Campaign does not change the message (unless set to do so by the user)
  • You can add standardized content (which you can then specify within the email template). For example, you can set the template to add the footer “Fly ABC Airlines” one month, then change the footer the following month to read, “Rent from ABC Cars"
• Static content: You can enter HTML headers and footers directly into the Acoustic Campaign email body and send as part of the outbound message
• Static message header information: You can reuse inbound header information (From name, From address, Reply to address, and subject) in the outbound message or replace it with a static string
• Suppression list: Based on opt-outs and returned emails (marked undeliverable)

Use this table to compare the variety of methods Acoustic Campaign offers for sending email responses to clients:

Custom Domain: Transact emails for each client are sent from a new (unique) custom domain (IP address) to separate customer transaction emails from their marketing emails. The cost of this implementation is included in the Transact license fee.

Transact SMTP supports standard email SMTP protocols, as shown:

• Inbound body types
  • HTML
  • Text
  • Multipart alternative
• Transact outbound body types
  • HTML
  • Text
  • Text as HTML
  • Multipart alternative (allows the email client to display the best format for viewing)
• Relative (linked) images
• X- headers (see What are the X-header requirements and placements?)
• Relative (linked) Attachments
• International subject-line encoding (either as 64-bit or Quoted Printable)
• Undeliverable mail notifications (see How does Transact handle delivery and undeliverable (error handling) features? and How does Transact handle hard and soft bounces?)

Transact SMTP does not support these protocols:

• Traditional Carbon Copy (CC) and Blind Carbon Copy (BCC)
• Address literals (by using the receiving IP address instead of the domain name)
• Embedded images
• Attachments that are part of the inbound SMTP stream
• The following MIME body types:
• • Multipart Relative
  • Multipart Mixed

Transact supports the following Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME):

• Text and header information in character sets other than ASCII or US-ASCII
• Multipart message bodies

Notes:

• Transact does not support encryption
• You must send messages to the server in standard SMTP format (Transact does not support XML; however, you can use the Transact XML servlet for XML-based messages. Contact your Acoustic Campaign sales representative or Client Support for more information)
• Transact fully supports MIME

The Acoustic Campaign Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for SMTP uses a standard SMTP server. The connection is asynchronous. A greeting occurs and standard SMTP error codes appear, but message validation and error handling will not take place in the exchange.

The SMTP server identifies the email sender, sends EHLO and HELO greetings, as well as standard SMTP error codes. Authentication is not required since the IP address provides security.

Acoustic Campaign does not make any changes to the message, unless the user makes changes. You can elect to add standardized content (which you can then specify directly in the email template).

In addition to standard SMTP error codes returned during the MTA exchange, the Transact SMTP server also validates email messages (though later in the process). Transact then sends configuration error information and Invalid Email Format errors to the user at the 'Error Notification Email' address that is specified in Acoustic Campaign.

Transact sends error messages for the following issues:

• Connection verification (standard SMTP error codes)
• Invalid email format
• Suppressed email (see Suppression section)
• Setup issues (Transact cannot complete the Processing step if the user did not enter personalization tags in the email template as defined)

Transactional message groups can be:

• delivered
• hard bounce
• soft bounce
• experiencing transient delivery failures

Hard bounces do not typically auto-correct (for example, a user ID does not exist at an ISP) and Transact does not retry them. When a hard bounce occurs, it follows the Bounce Processing per the Undeliverable/Bounce settings for the organization.

Some soft bounces are similar to hard bounces and Transact does not retry them (for example, a full contact's mailbox would cause a 'bounce' and Transact would not retry sending it again). For other soft bounces and transient delivery issues, Transact retries the sending process for a period of time (examples of such issues include ISP throttling email rates or ISP connection failures).

The default retry interval is 5 minutes. Transact will attempt to resend undelivered messages after the retry interval passes.

A bounce-after, also related to soft bounces and transient failures (for example, an ISP not accepting mail due to limiting), has a retry interval of 24 hours. If the message still does not deliver after the retry, Transact flags the message as a 'bounce' and processes it according to organization settings.

Notes:

• Bounce-after retry interval for yahoo.com domains is set to 30 hours
• Acoustic Campaign works with all ISPs to ensure maximum delivery based on their requirements

Transact SMTP supports FCC, domain, prefix, and global-level suppression.