GroupWise mail box is slow to refresh

GroupWise mail box is slow to refresh
Busy searches fail
Notify not prompting for new mail
New mail does not show up in inbox at the refresh interval

Correct UDP transmission issues. Routers, switches and Nics can be checked for transmit and send statistics and failures. Q57,B57, N1000, and N100 drivers or NICs that use these drivers are mostly responsible for this problem. Customers should first apply the latest driver and Novell TCP updates to try and correct the problem. If they do not help try swapping the NIC. Use a brand that is not based on the Broadcom chipset.
Try removing the GroupWise Client via Add Remove Programs, reboot the workstation, then reinstalled the GroupWise 6.5 SP2 client.

Poor UDP transmission on Network.

The automatic refresh for mail,notify, and busy searches are done via UDP. The POA is designed to send a UDP packet to the workstation telling the workstation that there is new mail, the workstation will refresh to show new received items. Because UDP is a connectionless protocol there is nothing to check the success of the receipt of the UDP packet by the workstation this can cause mail to not show up in the inbox at the expected times if the network is having UDP transmission issues.

The GroupWise client connects the Post office with a TCP/IP connection but mail polling intervals are sent using UDP.

Re-establishing the TCP/IP connection can make new mail items show up in the mail box. When you hit F5 to refresh the inbox a TCP/IP packet is sent to the POA requesting new mail items and new mail may show up in the inbox at this time.

TID 10019157 explains the TCP/IP connection for the GroupWise client and the time out design of the POA. The POA is designed to time out a workstation connection to the POA if the connection has been idle for over 28 minutes. Sending mail, changing between folders or refreshing F5 will re-establish the TCP connection which can also update the inbox if the UDP packets have failed to get to the client and update the inbox prior to this.

In a similar situation, another customer found the problem was related to the currently installed GroupWise Client. Once they removed the GroupWise Client and reinstalled it the problem never returned.
In some cases it has been noted that this symptom was resolved by replacing the ofviews directory in the root of the live post office. The Ofviews are accessed by the client and if not at the current date can delay or behave adversely. Usually there are 8209 errors when users login in the verbose POA log when the ofviews files are old.
If you are running Window XP you may need to add GroupWise and Notify to the list of allow applications in the firewall configuration
It is possible to increase the rate at which the GroupWise client polls the POA for new mail. This polling Interval can be adjusted in the registry of the PC where the client runs. To try this create a new reg key IE: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\novell\groupwise\client\ClientServer\MaxPollingInterval

Create a new Key named ClientServer in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\novell\groupwise\client\ then create a Dword Value called MaxPollingInterval and set this value to 6000. This setting will tell the client to poll every 1 minute.

The newer GroupWise clients 6.5.4 + allow you to see the SLAP in the ACCOUNTS / Show status window seeing this indicates the client is pulling.


Formerly known as TID# 10090384