Individual E-Mails To Multiple Recipients In Roster

Hi

I am wondering what the reason is for sending each recipient an individual e-mail and not one e-mail to all the recipients within a roster. The end result is multiple sent e-mails and not one e-mail to mutiple recipients. When it is sent as one e-mail the other recipients can see who received it which is quite helpful

Aidan

The answer to this requires an explanation of how things work one level up from the email notification profile, in the interaction between the notification block and notification profiles. The notification profile API specifies that the act of notification requires, for the sake of this explanation, a (User, List). I think originally we had defined it as (List, List), but this didn’t work out for a number of reasons.

Notifications being handed to the profiles one user at a time allows:

  1. The notification block handles consolidation of alarm events.
  2. The notification block can be responsible for implementing a forced delay between notification attempts.
  3. The notification block can use multiple notification profiles, which one gets used being determined on a per-user basis when it comes time to notify.
  4. It’s the only way two-way interaction (acknowledgement) in profiles is possible. You can’t identify the user a notification was sent to without associating some kind of unique identifier with that user.

It turns out 1 and 2 are possible to implement the profiles themselves, but it requires a bunch of duplication of some really tricky logic across every implementation of a notification profile.

Anyways, as a terrible work-around that negates the benefits of having schedules and rosters, you can create a ‘virtual’ user that has all the email addresses on it, and notify just that virtual user. Multiple email addresses belonging to a single user are sent as one email using the ‘TO’ field.

Kevin

Thanks for the detailed explanation of how it works. I like the functionality of schedules and rosters so can live with the individual e-Mails

Aidan