Environment
Retain (all versions)
GroupWise
Situation
Duplicate folders and messages show up in users' Retain mailboxes.
Resolution
Retain is working as designed. It keys off of the GroupWise message ID to determine whether the message already exists in the Retain archives. The message IDs of the duplicate messages are unique in the GroupWise system so both get archived.
There are two possible scenarios that can cause GroupWise to produce unique message ID's for the same message:
1. Users' messages are archived. After this, the users archive their messages into their personal GroupWise archive. At this point, the message ID of each message archived into the GroupWise personal archive changes. The PAM tool is run. It gets configured to archive all messages in the archive; thus, the messages that were archived into Retain earlier that are now in the personal archives get archived again. Retain looks at the message ID of the message and compares it to what it has in the system. Since the message ID has changed by being archived in GroupWise, Retain does not find a duplicate and allows it to be stored.
This is the most likely scenario. Scenario 2 has been seen but it is more rare...
2. Users archive messages in GroupWise. They then make a copy of their archive folder and place it somewhere else. Meanwhile, they unarchive the messages. At some point, they re-archive the messages. Now the messages get a new message ID. The PAM tool is used to archive both sets of archive folders resulting in duplicate messages.
To confirm this, the administrator can log into the Retain server web interface:
1. Open an affected user's mailbox.
2. Open one of the duplicate messages and click on the "Properties" tab.
3. Take note of the "Parent Node" number. This is the message ID for that message.
4. Open the other duplicate message and do the same thing. The message ID will be different.
To avoid such situations, the administrator should disable the GroupWise personal archiving feature before running a Retain archive job. In this way, the customer is assured that the users are not archiving messages into their personal archive that were already archived into Retain.