Sending emails on contact create/update with Outbound Email

Question

I am trying to send an email to a contact when they register or update their profile. The Outbound Email CD API provides the following example for sending an email on a contact update:

Contact contact = new Contact();
contact.ExtendedDetails["Identification_key"].Value = "[email protected]";
contact.ExtendedDetails["Identification_source"].Value = "Global";
contact.EmailAddress = "[email protected]";
contact.ExtendedDetails["NAME"].Value = "John";
contact.ExtendedDetails["SURNAME"].Value = "Mason";
contact.Save("tcm:42-4711-64");

A notification page ID is passed to the Save method, which is somehow supposed to trigger the mailing.

I am a bit confused as to what actually is supposed to happen. What type of item are you passing to the Save method?

How will this trigger a mailing?

Even though this is the CD API, does this email get sent from the CM?

Answer 1

Confirmation e-mails are not Mailings, unfortunately. They should be, but we haven't gotten around to changing them yet (a question of priorities).

As such, you need to specify the information that is normally contained in a Mailing in a number of different ways:

1. When creating the Contact on your website (contact.Save method), you pass in the URI of the Page that you want to render and use as the body of the e-mail.
2. In the OutboundEmail.xml configuration on the Content Manager, you specify the Publication Target to use when rendering and the e-mail headers such as the name and e-mail address to use as the sender, the subject of the e-mail, etc. You can specify these settings for all confirmation e-mails at once or selectively overwrite the settings for specific confirmation e-mails (based on the Page you chose to render). See "Configuring confirmation e-mails" for more on this.
3. When the Contact is synchronized and thus created on the Content Manager, the confirmation e-mail will be created based on the information specified in step 1 and 2 - and the e-mail will be sent to the Contact's e-mail address.

The same steps can happen when you edit and save an existing Contact. For instance, this is used when confirming the subscription: the Contact's subscription status is updated and a new e-mail is often sent to let the Contact know that the opt-in process was successful.

Answer 2

You need to set up it in the OutboundEmail.xml file, it is not needed to set up Triggered Emails, here a sample:

<ConfirmationEmail page="tcm:11-556-64">
    <Subject>Subject</Subject>
    <SenderName>Sender</SenderName>
    <SenderAddress>[email protected]</SenderAddress>
    <!--<ReplyAddress>newsletter@localhost</ReplyAddress>-->
    <!--<RequireAllFields>false</RequireAllFields>-->
</ConfirmationEmail>

Once you have this, you can start sending emails after you call.

Contact.Save("tcm:11-556-64");

Answer 3

You need to setup the triggered emails on the CM side. Check the documentation for reference (requires login).

You also need to make sure that you setup AM Profile sync between CM and CD. The emails get sent from CM side (using the Outbound Email), so you need have the working email templates and tested.