The Problem with Qlik NPrinting user emails
Did you ever get angry because Qlik NPrinting allows you to have only one user per email address and it makes advanced report deliveries so complicated? You need to send one report to one user, but in several files using different filters. But NPrinting won’t allow you to create different users using the same email address, because the email address is (was?) a primary key in NPrinting repository database. (It is not anymore, there’s an UUID, but for some reason the limitation remains ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
Plus what?
Question number two: did you ever hear about “plus addressing” (or subaddressing to be exact)? It is a feature offered by many email service providers like Gmail, Outlook.com etc. which allows you to use a simple trick for advanced filtering in your mailbox. Let’s say you started to receive a lot of spam recently and you want to find out which website leaked your email address to spammers. Now let’s assume a simple email address of example@gmail.com. You can change your email address in your online accounts to say example+amazon@gmail.com for Amazon account, example+fb@gmail.com for Facebook account… You get the idea. Gmail will be still able to receive your emails to your existing example@gmail.com mailbox, but you’ll see the plus part in the “To” field. This allows you to set up filters based on To field. When a spam message comes, it might contain the “plus” part, and you have your spamming culprit.
Oh, I see!
I am sure you already know where I am going with this post. You can easily use plus addressing with Qlik NPrinting! Simply:
- Create as many users as you need. Use the very same email address, only differentiated by the “plus” part
- Associate different filters with different users
- Add the users to a publish task
- Run the task
If the recipients of your Qlik NPrinting reports are on a service supporting plus addressing, you win. (⌐■_■)
Please note that for some services this feature might not be turned on by default. See here to learn how to turn it on for Exchange Online.