Groupwise trash

There's no central way to force all mailboxes to empty their trash in the way its done from the client.

You can go into the PO properties and force certain things to happen in terms of days before events. For example, you can force all E-Mail over X days old to be thrown in the trash, and you can lock down the exact number of days items remain in the trash before they are deleted (and setting that value very low will, of course, result in rapidly-emptying trash).

Another idea is to go into GWCHECK and run a Expire on the Post Office - all messages older than the Expiration you select are targetted. I'm trying to remember if messages expired this way get deleted or just put into trash.

I'm not sure of your skill level with GroupWise, if you need me to refer you to specific screens or tabs in ConsoleOne, let me know.

Also, you just want these out of the mailboxes, or do you want them completely destroyed? In GroupWise, E-Mail that is deleted remains recoverable until the database is compressed.

Have you told your users to Archive stuff they want to preserve?

we tried to create the events but nothing happens. The main problem that we have is that we don't allow archiving and the trash bins in everyones mailbox are going so large that it is filling up the sys vol. In the log files for the events the only thing logged is start and end event even when we use verbose logging. We even tried the mailbox cleanup but all that did is put most of the deleted mail back in the inbox.

GOAL : I only want to hold onto 7 days of trash and sent items

Is there anyway to do a clean out of all trash bins manually just to get what is in there out to clean the server up a little?

Ahh I understand your desired goal now, 7 days of sent items, eh? Most mail admins would love your settings :)

You will need 2 seperate Scheduled Events to accomplish this:
1 for the Sent items and a second one to handle that trash (since you want to dump received items as well)

#1 ) Expire and Reduce only sent items older than 7 days
#2) Expire and Reduce all items in Trash older than 7 days

Once you have created the Scheduled Events to delete Sent items and Trash older than 7 days, you will have to restart the POA for scheduled events to take effect.

Following up on my last comment, the ONLY thing that belong on SYS: is the OS, the OS support files, and utilities. NEVER put user data, GroupWise message stores, Print Queues, or anything else on SYS. NEVER NEVER NEVER.

If I were you, I would shut down GroupWise and move the Post Office, MTA and software subdirectories to another volume, correct the GroupWise objects in NDS, and then bring it back up. Don't hesitate to open an incident with Novell Support to walk you through this. This system design error is correctable, but it has to be done right.

Best practice is to create a Volume in its own Pool (I assume you use NSS, since you're on NetWare v6) and put GroupWise exclusively on that Volume, then set the entire Volume to Purge Immediate (in NSS, I think its called No Salvage).

waybadmojo's idea will work. You can also go into ConsoleOne in the GroupWise view, select the Post Office (NOT the POA), and lock down client settings on the length of time an item can stay in the trash. That won't help with Sent Items.

Question: WHY do you not allow Archiving? Its a great way to get stuff out of the live system without forcing users to delete it.

Back to not putting the message store on SYS:, here's why. SYS: is the System volume. It contains the OS, and, more importantly, the NDS database. If SYS: fills up (say, someone accidentally attaches their hard drive - the WHOLE thing - to an E-Mail...don't laugh, I've seen it happen), TTS dies and NDS is almost certainly going to end up with a corrupted database on that server (its highly unlikely the corruption would leave that one server).

For this reason, no NetWare admin will put anything that the users can write to on SYS: That means no user home directories, no print queues, no message stores, NOTHING. End users should have NO capability to write to SYS: in any way, shape or form. That's what other Volumes are for (in an NSS environment, have a caution that SYS: resides in an independent NSS Pool, and not the same Pool as other Volumes).

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to address this issue immediately.

If you decide to go with the client options for trash (a good idea even if you use the scheduled actions trash attack) do note that locking down client options will NOT take immediate effect.

In order to "push" these settings down to the client, a client options reset is required. Optionally, reinstalling the client will read the client options from the mothership. Users can't get around scheduled actions.

Sorry for all of the white space in my previous post, must have fallen asleep on my <Enter> key...

uh, I've never had to reinstall or do a Reset Client Options to get anything I've changed to take affect.  Normally, once the user shuts down the GroupWise client (and Notify) and restart it (say, after a reboot) then the changes take affect.

Sorry, waybadmojo, I don't think you're right. The client receives the lockdown information when they connect into the POA. Once you change the settings (this is what I suggested in my original comment, thanks to DSPoole for getting more specific on exactly how to do it) they take effect when the client next logs in. At least its that way in v6 and later. Might have been different in earlier version.

PsiCop - 5.5 EP1 didn't have problems either.

You guys are right, the lockdown works as advertised in the 6.03 system I just built.. I must have been having throwbacks to my old GW 5.5 days...

Thanks for keeping me honest!

I've been working with GroupWise since v4.1a and I sometimes forget what feature went with which version too. Don't worry about it.

I've worked with GroupWise since it was owned by WordPerfect ;)

You probably sent your first network packet with smoke signals, too. :-)

you didn't have packet collisions back then...

Yeah, but wind would cause bit drift.

and bandwidth was really lousy ;)

3 bits per twig?


(You realize, of course, that this is the sort of conversation that can only go downhill....)

Hello, itheadaches...what's your status?