Sent item remains in pending delivery - indefinately

  • 3223895
  • 15-Oct-2007
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell GroupWise Internet Agent (GWIA) 7
Novell GroupWise 7
GWAVA 3.72

Situation

HTML composition on by default.
Signatures were primarily used.
Signatures included embedded .GIF files.
Outbound email reaches recipient through GWIA.
GWAVA 3.72 scanning enabled in MTA mode.
Outbound email with signature and image remained in pending status - indefinately.
Outbound email without signature or image status successfully updated.

Resolution

Upgraded to GWAVA 4.0.
GWAVA 4.x changes where the scanning of email takes place. It was moved from the MTA's and POA's to the GWIA.

Additional Information

Mail was traversing the system from client to POA, from POA to MTA, however - upon reaching the MTA, the outbound email was mistakenly identified as inbound email by GWAVA due to the fact that it had amime.822 file and GIF file associated with it. The MTA has no idea about direction, it's either a message it must deal with on it's domain, or pass on to an owning domain. When GWAVA attempted to identify the mail message's direction, it saw the attachment mime.822 and assumed that it was inbound, it weighted the message and marked it as spam, blocking it's delivery on the MTA. GWAVA then took the message, composed an SMTP message and dropped it into the GWIA's send queue for delivery. This broke the status checking for GroupWise.