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Preventing Vacation Reply Loops

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sobak

MIS
Feb 22, 2001
609
US
A while ago I had a user setup his vacation reply rule and leave the office. About a day after he was gone I had an issue with my e-mail server, upon further investigation I found that his vacation rule was causing havoc on my network so I disabled it. Looking into it further revealed the source of the problem.

It all started with a person on the Internet that also had a vacation rule setup, instead of just replying to sender they had it reply to all. When my user received the bounce e-mail he also replied back to the sender with his vacation reply thus setting up a loop. I know internally GroupWise will only send a rule generated reply 4 times before it breaks it. Unfortunately I haven’t seen the same work with e-mails sent across the GWIA. To prevent this from happening I setup an access list to prevent rule generated e-mails from passing over the GWIA but some of my users are now questing why they can’t reply to their clients when they are out of the office.

What is a good way to prevent a loop from happening in the future? When the original problem happened we were on GroupWise 5.5, since then we’ve upgraded to 6.5. Does GroupWise 6.5 handle rule generated e-mails across the GWIA any differently? Can I prevent this from happening in the future? Ultimately I ended up deleting the users e-mail account and then recreating it, in the short period of time they generated about 50,000 messages between the two of them.

Anyone’s thoughts on this matter will be appreciated.


david e
*end users are just like computers, some you can work with...others just need a simple reBOOTing to fix their problems.*
 
Hummmm, seems digging a little deeper into this problem I found some useful information.

According to Novell, GroupWise 6.x now will only reply once to an e-mail address that is setup to reply to incoming addresses. This is a very good thing, the only way you can clear out the storage of e-mail addresses is to disable the rule and then re-enable it.

I found the information here....


Hope this will benefit others as this has me...

david e
*end users are just like computers, some you can work with...others just need a simple reBOOTing to fix their problems.*
 
Review the help file for how to create a "vacation" rule. I think they refer to it as vacation as opposed to Outlooks "Out of Office" reply. The steps they recommend when creating the rule help limit the loop because it forces the rule to NOT reply to vacation or out of office replies. Then again, like you stated above, it my only recognize internal vacation rules and not internet email.

--Scott
 
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