CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello -
  This may sound crazy, but is it possible to change the domain for all CiviMail HTTP traffic, assuming we have Drupal for the Website?  I'm not even sure whether we want to do this or not, but if we are using only the CiviMail component of CiviCRM, could we have a back-end server for sending and receiving mail traffic, then have another Drupal server for handling the HTTP port 80/443 traffic for the mailing display, subscribe/unsubscribe, and track mailing openings?
  I do have this almost working; I can display mailings and the subscribe form, but the subscribe.url token has the back-end server's name, and I don't know yet about unsubscribe or the open.php and url.php domains.
  Please let me know if anybody has thought about or tried to do this.
Thanks

I'm not sure how much info I want to give out here about our use case for civi.  Yes, we have smtp split off onto separate servers, but the question was only for Web traffic.  We want to use our Drupal sites as the front-end for maintaining contacts and viewing mailings.

Here's another way of asking.  Has anybody set up civi using three servers: one for public access that is integrated with the Website, one for updates where the Websites and civimail mailings or petitions are created and/or updated, and possibly a third server for civicrm cron jobs?

for the NYSS, we have:

- DB server
- App server
- SMTP server (3rd party service)
- Squid server (http://www.squid-cache.org/)

the DB and App server are completely behind a firewall. the SMTP service (Sendgrid) handles the unsubscribe requests and confirmed deliveries, etc., and we have a script that syncs that data to civicrm (it's actually event based, so we receive notification when an event occurs and then process it).

the Squid server is the only public facing side of the equation, and is used to service the graphics from the emails as cached files. when an email is delivered, the image urls are rewritten to reference the squid url. when the email is read and those references are hit, squid retrieves the image from civicrm (behind the firewall) and keeps a cached version. so the public is only ever hitting squid.

your use case is similar, but would need to extend the scope of what squid does to include the actual action links and such. when we initially setup squid we did some basic proof of concepts and were able to pass url based actions through to the civi installation. but I don't recall if we actually displayed civi forms and pages. squid seemed to be highly configurable, so with patience and persistence, it could probably be worked out.

we have a callback script that responds to the events and stores the event data in a separate db in correlated tables: https://github.com/nysenate/SendgridStatsAccumulator

we then poll the db via cron from each site in order to process the data into civicrm:
https://github.com/nysenate/Bluebird-CRM/blob/dev/civicrm/scripts/updateSendGridStats.php