Chapter 34. Creating a GroupWise-to-GroupWise Communication Solution Across the Internet

Wouldn't it be great if everybody used GroupWise all over the world? Well, it won't happen, of course, but it would certainly solve a lot of problems when communicating with other organizations around the world. Our common denominator is currently SMTP, developed during the early days of the Internet to enable a few thousand people at universities and government agencies to communicate via the still-friendly Internet. Oh boy, have we seen some changes there! Nowadays the Internet is used by billions of people, but the threats and challenges have also developed immensely. For example, the estimates are that approximately 50% of the total email volume can be tagged as spam, unwanted or unnecessary email. And the number of virus attacks is also incredible.

We've learned to live with these challenges, but many of these problems arise from the fact that SMTP has never been designed with these challenges in mind. And although the Enhanced SMTP (ESMTP) tries to plug a few holes, this still isn't good enough. For example, by default, messages sent by either protocol are still in plain readable ASCII. We can, of course, use Secure Messaging with S/Mime to solve this problem, as described in Chapter 30, "Creating a Securing Messaging Solution," but there are other ways as well. You can let your GroupWise system talk to other GroupWise systems directly and natively with much more security and other features by using GroupWise GWMTP communication between your MTA and an MTA at the other side. No need to use the GWIA, just GroupWise-to-GroupWise and automatically!

This chapter explains how to set up and configure GWMTP communication across the Internet, but before you can start using this you need to make sure you understand the concept of GroupWise Internet addressing, as discussed in Chapter 16, "Internet Addressing." By default, when you install GroupWise, Internet addressing is not enabled, but you need to enable it before you can use GWMTP MTA-to-MTA communication. So make sure you've implemented Internet addressing as explained in Chapter 16 before you implement GWMTP.