Using HMACSHA1 Handlebars to generate authentication tokens

You can use HMACSHA1 Handlebars to generate authentication tokens that your website can use to validate or authenticate users' data without including the literal value anywhere in a message body.

This is useful if you want to include userId as a merge parameter in your hosted unsubscribe URL to take users to a personalized page. In the URL, the user ID will be hashed instead of containing the literal userId value.

The HMACSHA1 helper can be used to encrypt any values, including any field on the user's profile, event fields, or universal merge parameters.

Enable HMACSHA1 Handlebars by going to Settings > Project Settings and add an HMAC secret. This can be any combination of letters, numbers and symbols. It is similar to setting a password.

You can do this with any user profile field that exists on the user's profile, as well as the universal fields email, campaignId, and templateId.

If you need to grab an unhashed user id from the hosted unsubscribe URL, you can simply insert the merge parameter for that field without the HMACSHA1 helper.