Hiding email addresses

Configure IBM® Connections to prevent email addresses from being displayed in the product to protect the privacy of your users.

Before you begin

Test notifications to ensure that your mail servers are set up correctly. Edit the notification-config.xml file to define a valid email address for the global administrator and alternative addresses for the different types of notifications that are sent by each application. For more information, see Defining valid administrator email address.
Attention: Do not configure IBM Connections to hide email addresses if you are using any of the IBM Connections extensions. Extensions such as the IBM Connections Plug-in for Notes® or IBM Connections Plug-in for Sametime®, require addresses to be exposed because they rely on email addresses to identify users. For more information, see the Extending section of the product documentation for a list of available IBM Connections extensions.

About this task

When you prevent emails from displaying, email addresses are hidden in the following places:
  • Members fields. When you begin to type a name into a name field, a list of options is displayed. By default, this list is composed of email addresses. If you configure IBM Connections to hide email addresses, the list is composed of display names instead.
  • URLs. Email addresses are often sent as parameters in URLs. This setting prevents the email address from being used in URLs. A customer ID is used instead.
  • Notifications. IBM Connections sends email notifications in response to various user actions. For example, when you add members to an activity, they receive email notifications rthat inform them about the activity. Other notifications are generated automatically by the server. For example, automatic notifications are sent to activity owners to warn them that an activity will be marked complete because of lack of use. When you indicate that you do not want to expose email addresses, notifications appear to originate from the administrator email address. In addition, the email addresses of the recipients are added to the BCC field of the notification.
  • Profiles business card. The email address that usually is displayed in business cards is not displayed nor.
Note to programmers: If you configure IBM Connections to keep email addresses private, you cannot use the email parameter to represent a person in GET requests for Atom feeds. Instead, you must use the userid parameter.

To hide email addresses, complete the following steps:

Procedure

  1. Open a command prompt and then change to the following directory on the WebSphere® Application Server that hosts IBM Connections:
    • AIX® or Linux™:/opt/IBM/Connections/ConfigEngine
    • Microsoft™ Windows™:C:\IBM\Connections\ConfigEngine
  2. Run the script that configures IBM Connections to hide email addresses:
    • AIX or Linux: ./ConfigEngine.sh action-hide-email > /tmp/hide_email.log 2>&1
    • Windows: ConfigEngine.bat action-hide-email > D:/hide_email.log 2>&1
    For example, on the Windows operating system, enter the following command:ConfigEngine.bat action-hide-email > D:/hide_email.log 2>&1
  3. Remove email address references from user profiles. For more information, see Configuring advanced search.
  4. Restart the server.