How does Outbound Email knows what URL to use in an email?

Question

How does outbound email know what URL it needs to add to an email? Is there a link between an email publication and a website publication?

I have tried to find this in the Tridion documentation but it is not very clear about the subject.

I ask this question because my client wants to start sending emails to their subscribed customers and this needs to contain the correct links. So mails sent to the fr_be address book need to contain links to http://website.be/fr_be/somepage.aspx, and emails to the fr_lu address book should link to http://website.lu/fr_lu/somepage.aspx.

The setup we currently have is: Website publications for an nl_be site, fr_be website and fr_lu website and 2 email publications one for nl_be and one for fr_be. This setup was done before I started on the project. I wanted to test a mailing but I have some issues with the links.

I contacted SDL to see what the correct setup is and it seems that we need to create an fr_lu email publication to be able to send mails with the fr_lu url. But this means that we must duplicate all our "publishable" publications when we want to send out also mails for this publications.

In the near future the client wants to also send a mailing to their employees with links to the Intranet. So if we follow SDL's advice this will mean two extra email publications.

Is this correct or are there other ways to do this?

The clue to a good setup is probably the answer on my question about how an email publication knows what URL to render in the send email.

Thanks for your answers and feedback.

Answer 1

I think the answer to this has two parts. First part is resolving the url to the correct publication, the second part is knowing to which audience your mail is sent.

The first part is (relatively) easy. Using a custom TCDL tag, you could make your own link resolving logic. We implemented something similar to link between two separate publications (componentlinks from publication A would then resolve to a link to publication B) - I think you're after something similar.
Will Price wrote an article on how to do this : http://www.tridiondeveloper.com/cleaning-and-extending-dynamic-linking

Now, in this tagrenderer logic, you would need to know to which publication you need to link to (to publication A for be_fr, publication B for lu_fr,...). You could achieve this by adding an extra parameter to your tcdl tag that holds the audience language.
I'm not exactly sure how to add this parameter. Maybe you can build a custom template building block to find out to which address book you are sending the mail (if this is possible), or you could just create two separate mails : two pages in tridion holding the same components (the actual mail content) but each page has a metadata field defining the audience language.

This way, links in mail 1 could be resolved to publication fr_be, while links in mail 2 could be resolved to publication fr_lu, etc.

Answer 2

The URLs for tracking and subscription links are specified on the Properties of the Publication containing the Mailing. Any other links you wish to output in your e-mail would need to be managed manually.

One thing that you may not be aware of is that it is not required that the Publication is an E-mail Publication! You can create and send Mailings from your website Publications, which might make more sense in this case.

If you want to separate the content from your website content completely, then you would indeed need to create more E-mail Publications to use different tracking/subscription URLs for different sites. But that's your choice.