Message splitting
If you send an email to multiple recipients, and different rules are set to apply to these recipients, you would like each recipient to get the right version of your message. That is why CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro comes with the message splitting capability. This option is enabled by default. Use the links below to find out more about message splitting, and how to manage it.
How message splitting works
Message splitting, also called bifurcation, is a process in which the original message is divided into several identical copies. The number of copies depends on the number of different emails that the program needs to produce by applying different rules. For example, if there are 4 recipients of a message and that requires the program to generate 3 different emails, the message is split into 3 copies (Fig. 1.). Each copy is processed separately by the program and delivered to appropriate recipients. If the SIU feature is configured correctly, each copy also appears in the Sent Items folder (so you have multiple versions of the same email in Sent Items, each one with different rules applied).
Fig. 1. Message splitting in CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro.
If message splitting is disabled and a message is sent to several people, the program applies only the rule defined for the first person on the recipients’ list, and this rule is applied to all recipients.
- Messages sent to both internal and external recipients: If you set up different signatures for users within and users outside your organization by using the Message direction condition, emails sent outside your organization are never stamped with signatures designed for internal users. This holds true even if message splitting is disabled and the first recipient is an internal one. In other words, emails sent to internal recipients are stamped with the external signature as long as there is at least one external recipient in the To field, not necessarily listed as the first one. This is a safety mechanism to prevent external users from seeing your internal signature. This behavior does not apply if you define your internal/external signatures by using the Recipient is internal/external condition.
- Email header/envelope: No matter if you enable or disable message splitting in CodeTwo Exchange Rules, the email envelope is not changed: the To field of every email copy contains all the recipients. Only the body of each email copy is different, as a result of modification by different rules.
- Submission queue: Split (bifurcated) messages are not inserted into the submission queue again. If the CodeTwo Exchange Rules Transport Agent is the last one on the list of your transport agents, and you have other agents that would process such split messages differently, you may want to reverse the agents’ priority to make the CodeTwo agent the first one to process your message queue. See this article for details.
How to enable/disable message splitting
By default, the message splitting capability is turned on. You can manage it from the Administration Panel:
- Click the Settings button on the toolbar.
- In the Program settings window, click the Message splitting tab. Here, you can turn the option on or off (Fig. 2.).
Fig. 2. How to activate/deactivate message splitting.
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