Cisco Cisco Email Security Appliance C160 Mode D'Emploi

With IPMM, a single message body is created with variables representing locations in the message to be 
replaced for personalization. For each individual message recipient, only the recipient email address and 
the variable substitutions need to be transmitted to the email gateway. In addition, IPMM can be used to 
send certain recipients specific “parts” of the message body, while excluding certain parts from others 
recipients. (For example, suppose you needed to include a different copyright statements at the end of 
your messages to recipients in two different countries.) 

Using the Mail Merge function of the Cisco IronPort C350D appliance has many benefits: 

Ease of use for the mail administrator. The complexities of creating personalized messages for each 
recipient are removed, as IPMM provides variable substitution and an abstracted interface in many 
common languages.

Reduced load on message generation systems. By requiring one copy of the message body and a 
table of required substitutions, most of the message generation “work” is off-loaded from message 
generation systems and moved to the Cisco IronPort C350D appliance.

Increased delivery throughput. By reducing the resources necessary to accept and queue thousands 
of incoming messages, the Cisco IronPort appliance can significantly increase out-bound delivery 
performance.

Queue storage efficiency. By storing less information for each message recipient, users can achieve 
orders-of- magnitude, better use of queue storage on the C350D appliance.

IPMM extends SMTP as the transport protocol. There is no special configuration that needs to be made 
to the Cisco IronPort C350D appliance. (By default, IPMM can be enabled for private listeners and 
disabled for public listeners on the Cisco IronPort C350D Email Security appliance.) However, if you 
are not currently using SMTP as your injection protocol, you must create a new private listener that 
utilizes SMTP through the Cisco IronPort C350D appliance interface. 

Refer to the “Customizing Listeners” chapter in the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Email Advanced 
Configuration Guide for more information on configuring listeners. Use the 

setipmm

 subcommand of 

listenerconfig

 to enable IPMM on the injector. 

IPMM modifies SMTP by altering two commands — 

MAIL FROM

 and 

DATA

 — and adding another: 

XDFN

. 

The 

MAIL FROM

 command is replaced with 

XMRG FROM

 and, the 

DATA

 command is replaced with 

XPRT

. 

To generate a Mail Merge message, the commands used to generate the message need to be issued in a 
particular sequence.

The initial EHLO statement, identifying the sending host.

Each message starts with an XMRG FROM: statement, indicating the sender address.

Each recipient is then defined:

One or more XDFN variable allocation statements are made, including defining the parts 
(XDFN *PART=1,2,3…), and any other recipient specific variables.