Email Transport

TIBCO BusinessConnect™ Container Edition provides the ability to communicate with trading partners using email. The TIBCO BusinessConnect Email transport can be used to send or receive messages from email clients.

The TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition Email transport has the following features:

  • It enables users of email clients to exchange documents securely by signing the message with their private key and encrypting the message with the public certificate of their trading partner.
  • It conforms to the S/MIME standards.
  • It also offers the ability to send your business document as an attachment to a plain text message for exchanging messages with email clients that require a non-attachment (inline) message body.

The following options are available for the TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition Email transport:

  • Authentication Supported through digital signatures.
  • Security Supported through message encryption.
  • Non-repudiation Supported through digital signatures and email receipts.
  • Compression Supported through the compression before signing.

Message Compression

For large messages, compression is highly recommended. Do not use compression on smaller messages, since this might create a compressed message that is larger than the original. Compression is always performed before signing (if it is also applied). When outbound messages are compressed, files are in GZIP file format. For inbound messages which are compressed, files are decompressed automatically.

Attachments

TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition Email transport supports the sending of documents as attachments. When the option Send Data as Attachment is selected, the outbound document will be sent in a multipart/mixed MIME message as follows:

  • The first body part of the multipart message will contain a static string message, which can be ignored by the receiver of the message.
  • The second body part of the multipart message will contain the outbound document. This second body part will have a MIME Content Disposition header with a type of “attachment.”

When using TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition Email transport, it is also possible to include other attachments with the outbound document whether the main document is sent as an attachment or not. These attachments are included as additional body parts to the outbound MIME message. The body parts of all attachments will contain a Content Disposition header with a type of “attachment”.

When an email message containing attachments is signed, the entire multipart/mixed MIME message is signed. Likewise, when an email message containing attachments is encrypted, the entire multipart/mixed MIME message is encrypted.

Note: Not all TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition protocols support sending attachments with the Email transport. Those protocols which have support for passing attachment information in their messages to/from the private process can be used to send attachment with the Email transport. See the User's Guide of your TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition protocol to verify whether it supports sending attachments with the Email transport.

Content Disposition Filename

Some TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition protocols provide the ability for the private process to specify a filename to be used as the value of the filename parameter in the Content Disposition MIME header of outgoing MIME messages, including the messages sent using the TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition Email transport. The filename can be specified for the Content Disposition header associated with the main document and/or any attachments.

The TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition protocols that support specifying the filename value for the Content Disposition header will also pass the value of the filename parameter from the Content Disposition header of inbound email messages to the private process.

See the User’s Guide of the respective TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition protocol to verify whether it supports passing of the Content Disposition header filename to/from the private process.

Email Client Limitations

The following limitations exist:

TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition does not support receipts from Microsoft Outlook email clients. This could happen when TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition sends an email message that contains a document requesting a Receipt from Outlook email clients.

  • When sending a document from Outlook email clients to TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition, do not use any properties such as rich text, fancy colors, fonts supported by the respective clients.
  • When sending a document from Outlook email clients as inline and not as attachment, you must always choose a proper Content-Transfer-Encoding. Examples: base64, quoted-printable. Do not send the document as 7-bit encoding, which is the default for most email clients. Plain text documents could be altered by some mail agents and must be avoided when sending to TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition.

Configuring Email transport involves configuration tasks in the trading host and trading partner.

Identifying the Sender and Receiver

TIBCO BusinessConnect Container Edition Email transport uses standard To and From email addresses as defined in SMTP standard (RFC 2821). These email addresses must be defined in the

Valid Email Address List field in the Partner Management>Partners>Partner Name>Protocol> Edit Configuration > General. When email is received from the mail server:

  • The To address is matched against the email address entered in the host’s Valid Email Address List
  • The From address is matched against the trading partner’s Valid Email Address List