The purpose of the Exchange Listener synchronization service is to synchronize Creatio with Microsoft Exchange and IMAP/SMTP mail services using a subscription mechanism.
Attention. Since version 7.17.0, the Exchange Listener synchronization service is the only way to manage mail services. Use the microservice to manage mail services.
Workflow
The Exchange Listener service includes the following required components:
- Exchange Listener primary module
- NoSQL Redis DBMS
See the workflow of the Exchange Listener synchronization service in the figure below.
Exchange Listener module
The purpose of the Exchange Listener module is to subscribe to “new message” events using the mailbox credentials. The open subscription remains in the component memory to ensure a fast response time when new emails arrive. The email is downloaded upon receiving the corresponding event.
NoSQL Redis DBMS
The purpose of the NoSQL Redis DBMS is to create a scalable and fault-tolerant system of handler nodes. The Redis repository contains information about the mailboxes that are served. This enables any container to handle Creatio requests to add a new subscription or check the status of a specific subscription regardless of the subscription node.
Redis requirements:
- For Creatio version 7.18.2 and later, the Exchange Listener service must have authorized access to Redis.
- The Exchange Listener service must have a dedicated database.
Scalability
By default, separate nodes of the StatefulSet type process requests based on 1 processor replica per 50 active mailboxes. The replicaCount parameter manages the number of replicas. You can increase the number of processors by specifying the value during deployment. You can configure automatic scaling depending on the number of active subscriptions.
Compatibility with Creatio products
The Exchange Listener synchronization service version 1.0 (Microsoft Exchange support) is compatible with all Creatio products version 7.15.2 and later.
The Exchange Listener synchronization service version 2.0 (IMAP/SMTP support) is compatible with all Creatio products version 7.16 and later.
Deployment options
We recommend using the Kubernetes orchestrator and Helm package manager to deploy the service and ensure Creatio operates as intended in the production environment. Learn more about deploying the synchronization service via Kubernetes in the user documentation: Deploy the synchronization service via Kubernetes.
You can also use Docker to speed up deployment in the development environment. Learn more about deploying the synchronization service in Docker in the user documentation: Deploy the synchronization service in Docker.
An in-memory repository is sufficient to deploy the service.