In this issue I thought I would answer some of the questions I have received regarding the GroupWise Internet Agent (GWIA) one of the most critical agents in a email system. All the directions are for GroupWise 2014, but the features are also in GroupWise 2012, and indeed GroupWise 8, and you should be able to find them in the GWIA documentation.
Remember that if you are running GroupWise 8 then general support finished on 30th June 2014.
Q: We have some users that have a rule for forwarding all received messages to their external mail account. Is it possible to have these messages appear to have been received from the original sender and not from their GroupWise mail address? When they hit reply from their Google account, for example, it sends the message to their GroupWise account and not the original sender, which is annoying and not what we want.
A: Yes there is a way to do this. Edit the GWIA in the administration console, select the SMTP/MIME tab and check the Enable flat-forwarding option (See figure 1). If the message you are forwarding is attached to your mail message and the body has no text then the message will be flat forwarded. When the recipient replies to it it will be to the original sender and not the account that forwarded it.
Q: Is it possible to prevent users automatically forwarding messages to their external mail accounts? Many of our mail messages are confidential and my manager, for security reasons, does not wish them to be in a mail system that we have no control over.
A: Yes you can disable rule generated forwards. Edit the GWIA in the administration console, select the Access control tab and select the Default class of service in the settings section. Click on the SMTP outgoing tab and uncheck the Allow forwards option (see figure 2).
Repeat this for any additional classes of service that you may have. You can add an exception list to enable forwarding to specific email addresses.
Q: Is there a way to stop some of our users sending or receiving internet mail? We only wish to allow some of our users this functionality.
A: Yes. As with the previous question edit the default class of service and on the SMTP incoming tab and set the option to Prevent incoming messages. Similarly on the SMTP outgoing tab ensure that you prevent outgoing messages (See figure 3).
You can set up an exception list if there are only certain external addresses that you wish to allow communications with. Next create a new class of service and add the users you wish to be able to send/receive externally to that class and ensure that they are set to be allowed to send and receive SMTP messages.
Q: Is it possible to get status tracking on a mail message sent through the GWIA? At the moment all we are getting is a transferred status. It would be nice if we could get delivered and opened status.
A: This is a little trickier, you can not get the same level of status tracking on mail that you have within GroupWise when sending externally. However if the recipient‘s mail system supports Delivery Status Notification (DSN) you can be notified that the message was delivered.
In the GroupWise administration console click on your GWIA then select the SMTP/MIME tab, and edit the ESMTP settings, and enable the option for Enable Delivery Status Notification. The sender now needs to enable their send options to enable delivery confirmation, so in the client under Tools > Options > Send select the mail option and enable the delivery confirmation (see figure 5).
When you send an external mail, if the receiving system supports it, you will receive a delivered status in addition to the transferred status (see figure 6).
(Incomplete)
First published in OHM26 - July 2014