Nightly User Upkeep not removing old eMail.

  • 7000530
  • 30-May-2008
  • 26-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell GroupWise 7
Novell GroupWise Nightly User Upkeep

Situation

Nightly User Upkeep is not properly removing emails that fall outside the Mailbox and Trash retention threshold as defined within the Client Options of the Domain, Post Office and User levels.
User databases continue to grow even though Nightly User Upkeep has been run along with the Reduce option as found in GWCheck.

Resolution

Workaround:
Run GWCheck with Expire/Reduce Messages, selecting the Expire and reduce option with at least the "Items older than" and "Trash older than" and selecting the amount of days that deems needed or according to the Companies' mail retention criteria. This can be a time consuming operation, be sure to not schedule any other maintenance or backup task to close to the time frame of the Expire/Reduce task being ran.
 
Update:
This is working as designed.  It has been determined though that the documentation and help features in ConsoleOne do not explain enough about what settings determine how User Upkeep runs or what it actually cleans up.  The following changes are expected to be made for Bonsai.  This may vary a bit in the release time and content, but the basic content is below.

1) The cleanup options are split ... when choosing auto-archive then the code is executed by the client. When you choose auto-delete and empty trash, the code is run by the POA during nightly maintenance. It is also run by the client in caching mode.  User Upkeep can be set from either ConsoleOne, for Domain and Post Office as well as individual user levels, as well as in the client, assuming that it is not locked at a higher level. Settings are located in the Client Options, Environment Options, Cleanup tab.
2) When honoring the cleanup options we don't delete mail that has not been read, uncompleted tasks, meetings that have not occurred.
3) There is enough variance in honoring the cleanup options that they should not be seen as the enforcer of disk space management. Expire and reduce are the tool for that
 

Additional Information

When collecting statistics on emails that fall beyond both the Mailbox retention threshold and the Trash retention threshold numerous emails may be seen that can fall well past the threshold and in some cases may be several years older then desired.

Steps to Duplicate:

During this duplication, the utility Engwhip was used to generate large number of email, notes, tasks, appointments, and phone messages of varying size and priority. In one situation there was a 180 day retention policy, but to get a quicker duplication, the minimum 1 day auto delete was enabled for both removing the items from the mailbox as well as from the trash, was implemented. Approximately 1000 emails were generated every day prior to the User Upkeep being ran to ensure that the messages would be beyond the age threshold for the next User Upkeep scheduled to run.


1) From ConsoleOne, go into the Properties of the POA.
2) Drop down to the Maintenance section on the GroupWise tab.
3) Enable "Perform User Upkeep".
4) Select which hour is desired for the User Upkeep to run. Keep in mind that values range is 0 - 23, or from Midnight to 11 p.m. based on the 24 hour clock. For this duplication, User Upkeep was set to run at 8, meaning 8 a.m. every day.
5) To get a good understanding of the issue, generate a large amount of emails to a user. As stated before the test, about 1000 items were delivered to the Mailbox of one user. After User Upkeep is ran, a varying number of items may be left, in this test about 200 were left. Emails were generated at about 7 a.m. so that the messages would be about 25 hours old, or beyond the 1 day threshold.
6) When setting up this duplication, the emails should not be deleted during the first User Upkeep session as the items will only be about an hour old and will not meet the minimum 1 day threshold.
7) About an hour before the next iteration of User Upkeep, generate a large number of emails, so that the item will be ready for the third iteration of User Upkeep.
8) Document the number of items from each day that are in the mail box as well as the trash. For what items are in the trash, document not only when they were deleted, but from what day they were deleted.
9) After User Upkeep is ran, document how many items are left in the Mailbox vs how many were actually moved to the trash.
10) Repeat steps 5 - 9 for any length of time, during this duplication this was ran daily for about 10 days. These results will very.

Example Findings:
The following is based off the duplication, and individual testing and duplication results will very. These findings are given as a possible result to help demonstrate what may actually be seen.
After those 10 days there were a minimum of 257 emails left from each of those days ran, meaning there were at least 257 items left in the Mailbox on Day 1, Day 2 had at least the 257 emails from the day before, plus at least 257 from Day 2 so around 514 that remained well after the 1 day retention threshold was met. So after 10 days there were at least 2570 items that were past the 1 day retention threshold that User Upkeep did not delete, even though the actual number was closer to 3500.