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About Installing and Configuring Siebel Email Marketing

The Siebel Email Marketing Server consists of three components, each of which comes with its own installer and is separate from the Siebel Marketing Server installer. The installation media for the three Email Marketing Server components are distributed together on media separate from the Siebel Enterprise installation media.

This topic describes some of the issues to consider when installing the different components of Siebel Email Marketing. The Email Marketing components can reside outside the firewall, with ports opened for SOAP (HTTP) and networked file system access through the firewall. Alternatively, the Email Marketing components can reside inside the firewall with ports 80 and 25 opened on the firewall (or proxies) or relays put in place.

These components talk to the Siebel Marketing Object Manager using SOAP. For more information about the Siebel Java Data Bean, see Transports and Interfaces: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration.

Email Sending Daemon

The Email Sending Daemon (ESD) assembles an email to be sent to a list or segment of contacts and prospects and delivers each email to the corporate outbound Mail Transfer Agents. Assembly includes adding headers in front of the email message content and merging personalized data into the message content.

The Email Sending Daemon listens on port 8090 for SOAP requests from the Siebel Marketing Server. A SOAP request includes the filename of the email message content, the email message headers, and the Marketing Server subwave contacts and prospects list (containing mail merge data). These files are found in the Marketing File System which is commonly a networked directory accessible to the Email Sending Daemon. The Email Sending Daemon must be able to communicate with one or more outbound Mail Transfer Agents to send mailings over the internet. The Email Sending Daemon must be able to tell the Marketing Server when it has completed a subwave as well as deliver details of email address errors that occurred while it communicated using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol to the Mail Transfer Agents (called synchronous bounces).

The most common placement for the Email Sending Daemon is within the corporate network, behind the DMZ. However, the Email Sending Daemon component can be placed inside the DMZ or outside the firewall, if there is a port opened to connect to the Siebel Marketing Server using SOAP and the networked Marketing File System.

Bounce Handler Daemon

Typically, the Bounce Handler Daemon (BHD) receives and processes bounced mail on port 25 (the default SMTP port).

Email messages that have bounced appear similar to regular email, though their email message content and headers probably have noticeable differences in content. For a bounced email to be returned to the Bounce Handler Daemon, the original email must have a usable return address (the SMTP envelope from address). The correct SMTP envelope From Address is generated for you using the Bounce Handler Daemon's domain name (supplied by you when you configure the Email Marketing Server).

The recommended approach is to place the Bounce Handler Daemon computer in the DMZ. However, some network support technicians can choose to place the Bounce Handler Daemon behind an inbound Mail Transfer Agent. The approach that you choose depends on the configuration of your network, DMZ, existing inbound Mail Transfer Agent, and firewall. The following example describes a typical approach.

You might have a domain name of example.com and an inbound Mail Transfer Agent (in this example mail.example.com) for mail to that domain. The Mail Transfer Agent mail.example.com currently routes email successfully to computers in the internal network. It might be in the DMZ with a special hole for port 25 traffic or straddling the outer firewall with one NIC in the DMZ and the other NIC on the Internet. The Bounce Handler Daemon might be running inside the DMZ, with an internal-only hostname such as example-host.internal.example.com.

In this example, you would choose a Bounce Handler Daemon hostname such as bounces.example.com that is not already used by external DNS and then perform the following steps:

• Configure the Bounce Handler Daemon to use this hostname.
• Add a DNS MX record for this hostname to an internal DNS server that can be contacted by the inbound Mail Transfer Agent (mail.example.com).
• Add this hostname to the Internet DNS servers as a hostname with an IP address for the inbound Mail Transfer Agent.

Because the Internet DNS MX records for bounce.example.com point to the inbound Mail Transfer Agent, bounced email for the Bounce Handler Daemon is sent there first. Mail.example.com must be configured to relay the mail for bounces.example.com to the Bounce Handler Daemon using the internal DNS server for the correct internal IP address.

Organizations often create IP numbers that cannot be routed within their enterprise. For example, IP numbers starting with 10.* or 192.168.* are only available inside the enterprise. Similarly, organizations often have hostnames, such as my-machine.corp.example.com, that are only visible inside the company network. If you use an IP address or hostname that is only available inside your company network for your Bounce Handler Daemon hostname, then Mail Transfer Agents outside your network cannot connect to the Bounce Handler Daemon. Therefore, the Bounce Handler Daemon server must be available, directly or indirectly, from outside your network.

Click Through Daemon

The Click Through Daemon (CTD) listens on port 8060 for HTTP requests (Clickthrough, Message Open, Forward to a Friend and un-subscription and subscription requests). This component can be placed in the DMZ, inside or outside the firewall, if a port is opened that allows it to connect to the Siebel Marketing Server using SOAP protocol. Web proxy servers can be used to route the HTTP requests to the Click Through Daemon server.