Emails are merged to combine the contents of all the notifications, intended for each user, into a single email notification in order to minimize the number of messages that users receive and for convenient reading. With merging, the notifications are stored in the queue for the chosen time interval before they are sent to the recipients.
The email merging feature can work in conjunction with the email sequencing feature. The sending time of merged emails is calculated as detailed in the bulleted list below. When it is time to send a merged email, RiskVision checks to see if this is during sequencing hours. If it is during sequencing hours, then the merged email will not be sent until the sequencing hours are over.
The merging uses the following guidelines when sending notifications to recipients:
Assembles all the email notifications that are not marked as "Send Immediately."
- Segregates all the email notifications according to the recipient and sender email accounts in their own queue.
Continues to hold all messages for each sender-recipient pair until the oldest message in the queue has exceeded the merging period. When the oldest message exceeds the merging period, then all of the messages are sent.
- The queue for that sender-recipient pair starts to accumulate again until the oldest message exceeds the merging period.
To enable merging:
- In the Administration application, go to Administration > Notifications, and click the Sequencing & Merging tab
- Click Edit and then check the box next to the Merge emails option under the Email Merging section.
- Select the days in the first drop-down box and select the hours in the second drop-down box to recurringly send the merged emails after that many days and hours.
Example
This example shows you how notifications are sent when both sequencing and merging are enabled. To configure this scenario, In this context, enable the sequencing on Monday between 11 AM and 4 PM and set the merging to send notifications every 2 hours. Then, consider the following data in the table.
| Template | Sender | Recipient | In queue (hours) |
|---|---|---|---|
| N1 | Tom (tom@agl.com) | Nathan | 5 |
| N2 | Martin (martin@agl.com) | Paul | 4 |
| N3 | Tom (tom@agl.com) | Nathan | 3 |
| N4 | Martin (martin@agl.com) | David | 4 |
| N5 | Martin (martin@agl.com) | Nathan | 5 |
| N6 | Jane (Jane@domain.com) | Mary | 2 |
In the table above, the notifications N1 through N6 are queued because the email templates are marked as not to send immediately and the sequencing and merging are enabled. When notifications are triggered on Monday between 11 AM and 4 PM, they are stored in a queue until 4 PM and only then the notifications are sent. As you can see in the table that the notification N1 for user 'Nathan' is in the queue for 5 hours, the RiskVision Server marks that notification for sending to the intended recipient. Since merging is enabled, the RiskVision Server attempts to locate other notifications intended for the user 'Nathan' from the sender 'Tom.' When multiple notifications for a user from the same sender are found, the notifications are merged though other notifications for that user has been in the queue for less than 5 hours. In this case, there are two notifications to be sent from Tom to Nathan; one being in the queue for 5 hours and the other one for 3 hours. The content of these two notifications is merged and sent using a single notification. Since there is one more notification N5 to be sent from Martin to Nathan, the notification is sent using a separate email since the email template is configured to send from the sender email account 'Martin.'
