When an Email Campaign is launched in Messaging, it goes through two separate and distinct phases: building messages and sending messages.
In the "message building" phase, the platform executes the following steps:
Message Creation: In this step (sometimes called "Message List Creation" or "MLC"), the platform executes the Filter logic to identify the audience of intended recipients. From this audience, the platform checks the Sender Profile Status ID (and optionally also Preference flags, if used) to validate the eligibility of each recipient to be contacted. The platform also removes any records with blank or invalid email addresses.
Note: If you're viewing the Launch Statistics for a Campaign, please note that the Message Creation step will not show incremental progress. Because of the way the platform executes this step, you won't see a "percent complete" for Message Creation.
Content Calculation: In this step, the platform identifies all the possible content variations based on the Dynamic Content rules. The system then takes a "snapshot" of each content variation, and assigns each recipient in the Campaign audience to a content variation.
Personalization: In this step, the platform identifies the Personalization fields used in the Campaign content, and populates each of these fields based on the values present in the database.
The above three steps are often collectively referred to as the "queue" process.
All of the message content resides on a server called the Content Management Server, or CMS. Your database resides on a different server called the Data Management Server, or DMS. In the "message sending" phase, the system merges together the data and the content from these two servers in order to assemble the final messages. These messages are then transmitted to the recipients.
The Content Calculation, Personalization, and message sending steps are all executed in "chunks" consisting of 500 records each. If the audience size is less than 500 records, or if the last chunk of records is less than 500 records, than that chunk will contain the actual number of records.
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