Environment
Novell GroupWise 7 Client for Macintosh
Situation
If a received HTML message contains a link to an image on a remote server (rather than having the JPG embedded as part of the message), the GW 7.02 client for Mac will hang for a few minutes at a time if for some reason it cannot retrieve the image (if the HTTP server hosting the image is down, for example). When you double-click on a message in the main GroupWise client window, it does not open a separate message window, but instead the client immediately becomes unresponsive.
During the time the client is "hung", the GroupWise application window is completely unresponsive (user cannot select a message or the calendar, etc), but there is no "spinning beachball" typically seen if a Mac application hangs.
Eventually the client will come back and display the message with the "broken image" icon where the image should be (see attached PNG file), but it takes several minutes per image for the client to timeout, and to the user, the client appears to be completely hung.
During the time the client is "hung", the GroupWise application window is completely unresponsive (user cannot select a message or the calendar, etc), but there is no "spinning beachball" typically seen if a Mac application hangs.
Eventually the client will come back and display the message with the "broken image" icon where the image should be (see attached PNG file), but it takes several minutes per image for the client to timeout, and to the user, the client appears to be completely hung.
Resolution
Workaround: The GroupWise Client for Macintosh does not have the ability to use an HTTP proxy server if the Macintosh workstation is configured to proxy "Using a PAC file". Setup the Macintosh computer to configure proxies manually in the System Preferences > Network > Proxies >"Web Proxy (HTTP)" setting.
If the image on the remote HTTP server is not available, the manual proxy setting (above) will make no difference and the client will appear to be hung until the request times out.
The ability for the GroupWise Client for Macintosh to use an automatic proxy setting (PAC file) been reported to Development as an enhancement request and is being considered for the next release of GroupWise.