Private ESP

Many businesses are averse to sharing contact details of their users with third-party platforms like WebEngage.

We understand your concerns.

This is why we've made it possible for you to leverage a user's PII (Personally Identifiable Information) for sending Email campaigns without actually sharing their email addresses! This can be achieved by setting up a Private ESP API endpoint at your end.

You can think of Private ESP as a proxy layer that decrypts email addresses of an Email campaign's target audience before sending it to your ESP for delivery to your users. All you need to do is:

Step 1: Pass hashed PII data to WebEngage from your servers.

Step 2: Set up a Private ESP API endpoint to decrypt hashed email addresses.

Step 3: Configure Webhooks to ensure that the delivery status of each message is relayed back from your ESP --> Decryption Layer --> WebEngage Dashboard.

Step 4: Select Private ESP as the preferred ESP while creating the Email campaign. In doing so, we'll send all the messages to the specified endpoint (where you can decrypt the phone numbers and pass them to your preferred ESP).

PII Hashing

Let's get you acquainted with PII hashing or how you can encrypt a user's phone number and pass it to your WebEngage account.

Which Attributes Are PII?

WebEngage recognizes the user attributes, phone and email as PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Thus, if you opt for PII hashing, then instead of passing the actual data against these attributes, you will need to pass the corresponding hashes values against the attributes, hashed_phone and hashed_email.

Passing Hashed PII Values

All WebEngage platform integration SDKs enable you to pass hashed phone numbers and email addresses for each user. Here's an example to help you get started:

webengage.user.setAttribute({
  'we_hashed_phone': 'e0ec043b3f9e198ec09041687e4d4e8d',
  'we_hashed_email': '144e0424883546e07dcd727057fd3b62'
});

weUser.setHashedEmail(String hashedEmail)

weUser.setHashedPhoneNumber(String hashedPhoneNumber)

-(void) setHashedEmail:(NSString*)hasdhedemail;

-(void) setHashedPhone:(NSString*)hashedphone;

Please Note:

• The values passed against hashed_email must be encrypted in a format that you can decrypt later through the Private ESP.
• The encrypted value can be a maximum of 512 characters. Additional characters will be truncated.
• Please ensure that the actual email address is never passed through this method.

🚧

Start Here

• Web SDK

• Android SDK

• iOS SDK

• React Native

• Cordova/ Phone Gap/ Ionic

• Xamarin.Android

• Xamarin.iOS

• Unity.Android

• Unity.iOS

• You can also choose to pass and update hashed PII attributes through the WebEngage REST API.

Private Email Service Provider

• A private ESP is an API endpoint that you expose for WebEngage to call, which acts as a proxy between WebEngage and your actual Email service provider.

• WebEngage hits your Private ESP endpoint with a payload containing the hashed email identifiers, the message body, and some other data.

• WebEngage expects a JSON response at that instance denoting synchronous result (request success/failure).

• WebEngage also subscribes to your Webhooks and expects later hits, passing the subsequent Delivery Status Notifications: delivery (sent, bounced) and interaction (opened, clicked).

Here's how this works:

1. WebEngage POSTs to an API endpoint URL you provide us.

2. You can configure key-value pairs in the headers section in your dashboard to pass custom data with this POST request.
   a. Some headers cannot be overridden (e.g. “Content-Type”: “application/json”).
   b. Custom headers can be used for authentication.

3. A unique ID will always be passed in custom data: TrackerId in case of email.

4. Body of the POST request will be in JSON format. AMP emails can also be sent, check the Request format in subsequent section.

5. Response for the message request should be passed in the predefined format shown below.

6. Webhook settings:
   a. URL to be set on your side for real-time delivery reports. This URL can be accessed on WebEngage dashboard under Data Platform > Integrations > > Email Setup> Channels in your ESP list as shown below.

b. Delivery Status Notification request to be a POST (predefined JSON format).
c. Delivery Status Notification parameters must include the previously received TrackerId.
d. errorCode and errorMessage parameters and values in case of failure should be passed in the predefined format shown below.

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About Link Wrapping/Shortening

If your Private ESP is performing additional link wrapping on the links already wrapped by WebEngage (original URL) anywhere in the request payload, the wrapped domain must ask the caller to follow the original URL-encoded location.

For example, let's assume that the email contains the following hyperlink:

<a href=“https://google.co.in/?param=%3D%3D%2B%20%20abcd”> Link </a>

We have a parameter named param with a value of ==+ abcd here.

Thus, if you are further wrapping this link, then the wrapped domain must ask the caller to follow the URL-encoded location (https://google.co.in/?param=%3D%3D%2B%20%20abcd), and not the decoded one (https://google.co.in/?param===+ abcd).

Request (JSON)

{
	"email": {
		"from": "[email protected]",
		"fromName": "John Doe",
		"replyTo": [
			"[email protected]",
			"[email protected]"
		],
		"subject": "email subject",
		"text": "text body",
		"html": "html body",
		"recipients": {
			"to": [{
				"name": "Recipient1",
				"email": "abc12345" // Actual EmailIds or Encrypted EmailIds
			}, {
				"name": "Recipient2",
				"email": "[email protected]"
			}],
			"cc": [
				"[email protected]",
				"[email protected]"
			],
			"bcc": [
				"[email protected]",
				"[email protected]"
			]
		},
		"attachments": [{
			"name": "Attachment1",
			"url": "http://link/to/attachment/1"
		},{
			"name": "Attachment2",
			"url": "http://link/to/attachment/2"
		}]
	},
	"metadata": {
		"campaignType": "PROMOTIONAL",
		"custom": {
			"key1": "val1",
			"key2": "val2"
		},
		"timestamp": 1521012814,
		"messageId": "webengage-message-id"
	},
	"version": "1.0"
}

{
	"email": {
		"from": "[email protected]",
		"fromName": "John Doe",
		"replyTo": [
			"[email protected]",
			"[email protected]"
		],
		"subject": "email subject",
		"amp_html": "amp html body",
		"html": "fallback html body",
		"recipients": {
			"to": [{
				"name": "Recipient1",
				"email": "abc12345" // Actual EmailIds or Encrypted EmailIds
			}, {
				"name": "Recipient2",
				"email": "[email protected]"
			}],
			"cc": [
				"[email protected]",
				"[email protected]"
			],
			"bcc": [
				"[email protected]",
				"[email protected]"
			]
		},
		"attachments": [{
			"name": "Attachment1",
			"url": "http://link/to/attachment/1"
		},{
			"name": "Attachment2",
			"url": "http://link/to/attachment/2"
		}]
	},
	"metadata": {
		"campaignType": "PROMOTIONAL",
		"custom": {
			"key1": "val1",
			"key2": "val2"
		},
		"timestamp": 1521012814,
		"messageId": "webengage-message-id"
	},
	"version": "1.0"
}

Response

200 OK
{
	"status": "SUCCESS",
	"statusCode": 1000,
	"message": "NA"
}

200 OK
{
	"status": "ERROR",
	"statusCode": 9002,
	"message": "Daily email sending quota is over."
}

400 Bad Request
{
	"status": "ERROR",
	"statusCode": 9022,
	"message": "Unsupported version",
	"supportedVersion": "2.0" // Mandatory in case of status code 9022
}

Delivery Status Notification

event in the below payload can be SPAM, DELIVERED, BOUNCE or UNSUBSCRIBE.

{
	"messageId": "webengage-message-id",
	"event": "DELIVERED",
	"timestamp": 1521012814,
	"email": "email-id",
	"hashedEmail": "hashed-email-id",
	"statusCode": 1000, // Status Code (Integer) (Refer table below),
	"message": "NA / Description",
	"version": "1.0"
}

Status codes

WebEngage will respond to the delivery status notification sent by the service provider with an HTTP 2XX response code and will enqueue the event to process it. Here's a list of all the response codes for your reference:

We hope this has enabled you to set up a decryption layer for sending Email campaigns to encrypted email addresses. Please feel free to drop in a few lines at [email protected] in case you have further queries. We're always just an email away!