Sitecore xDB - How To Fix Right To Be Forgotten Breaking EXM Campaigns

Background

Our email manager faced an Email Experience Manager (EXM) issue where when starting or resuming an email campaign, it will start initializing and then it will go directly to a paused state.

Errors

The logs of our Content Management Server revealed the following errors: 

Cause

After digging in, I discovered that this was caused by contacts in our lists that where missing an Alias identifier. This is a dependency for EXM in the way it pulls in the necessary contact data during dispatch. 

What had happened was that our email manager had used the Anonymize feature in the Experience Profile dashboard that executes the right to be forgotten xConnect API under the covers. This process removes the Alias identifier from the contact record in our key xDB shard database tables. 

Checking the xDB Database

If you have SQL experience, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that the xDB databases are not that complicated to work with it all.

Executing the following SQL query helped me find the contacts that where missing contact identifiers:

If you compare what a normal contact looks like vs an anonymized contact, you can see that the records have been wiped from the key ContactIdentifiers and ContactIdentifiersIndex tables.

This is the SQL statement that I used:

Normal Contact

Anonymized Contact

Another important point to note is that when a contact has been anonymized, a new ConsentInformation facet as added to the contact.

 

The Fix

I simply wrote a SQL statement that would insert new Alias identifier records in the ContactIdentifiers and ContactIdentifiersIndex tables for the contacts in my lists that had been anonymized.

Running this SQL statement fixed the missing dependency that EXM required for its email dispatch, and our email campaigns starting sending again.