An Overview of Message Transfer Protocol and Internet Addressing


GroupWise was designed and engineered before the Internet was widely in use for sending SMTP messages via email. As a result, GroupWise uses a proprietary addressing scheme that is made up of the domain, post office, and user ID in a GroupWise system. Because of this, if you were to create a new GroupWise system, and then install the GroupWise Internet Agent (GWIA) to send SMTP messages via the Internet, your users would not be able to simply type an address in the format of user @ internetdomain.com and expect the GroupWise system to know what to do with this address.

When a GroupWise administrator enables Internet addressing, all GroupWise agentsincluding the GroupWise clientbecome aware of this fact, and are able to resolve Internet-style addresses natively. This gives the administrator a lot of flexibility with regard to the way that GroupWise can address and resolve Internet-style addresses.

GroupWise Internet addressing offers several advantages. This is just an overview of the most relevant advantages for this chapter; more can be found in Chapter 16:

  • GroupWise addresses become Internet addresses: With native Internet addressing, GroupWise addresses no longer need to be converted to Internet addressing formats when GroupWise mail is being sent out to the Internet. Instead of users being known internally to the GroupWise system as Domain.PostOffice.UserID, users will be internally known as userid@Internet domain name.

  • GWIA gains flexibility: With Internet addressing enabled, the GWIA will work very hard to match an Internet address with a GroupWise user for incoming SMTP mail. The gateway will still look for the old-style matches with aliases and foreign IDs, as well as for the Internet domain name formats. The term Internet domain name is specific to GroupWise Internet addressing. The Internet domain name is an extra attribute attached to every address in GroupWise, and it makes GroupWise addresses comply with Internet address formats.

    Note

    Internet domain names are sometimes referred to as IDOMAINs. This term might help avoid confusion.


  • You can have direct MTA-to-MTA connectivity between systems: With Internet addressing enabled, you can allow any message transfer agent (MTA) on your system to connect directly to another GroupWise system. The GroupWise message transfer protocol (GWMTP) allows GroupWise users to transparently communicate over the Internet with other GroupWise users in other systems.

    Sending messages via GWMTP effectively eliminates the need to convert messages bound to other GroupWise systems to SMTP format. No gateway or gateway conversions are needed for the two systems to communicate. Leaving the messages in their native format also allows for native GroupWise encryption, compression, and message formats to be retained. Keeping the native message type allows appointments to be sent to users in other GroupWise systems as appointments. These items will show up correctly on calendars, they can be accepted or rejected, and full status tracking is available. The native format also allows for busy searches across the Internet to other GroupWise systems.



NOVELL GroupWise 7 Administrator Solutions Guide
Novell GroupWise 7 Administrator Solutions Guide
ISBN: 0672327880
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 320
Authors: Tay Kratzer

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