Repairing Your Mailbox

Although GroupWise is probably the most stable, fault-tolerant, and highly available messaging system on the market, the ability to create a copy of your mailbox in either cache or remote mode (Chapter 10) implies that occasional repairing of that local message store will need to take place.

NOTE

If you run GroupWise only in online mode, your system administrator will automatically take care of any repairs you might have to run on your mailbox.

If you get a displayed notice stating "GroupWise has encountered a problem with your mailbox and will repair it the next time you start GroupWise," you should shut down the GroupWise program and allow it to complete the automatic repair the next time you start it.

Most problems in GroupWise are transparent to you as a user. In other words, GroupWise can detect and repair a small database problem before it ever manifests into something larger. However, larger problems may occasionally occur.

In addition, it is a good practice to run a periodic repair on your mailbox even if no problems are occurring.

To perform the repair process, choose Tools, Repair Mailbox. You may be prompted to perform a backup first (contact your system administrator to determine whether this needs to occur).

NOTE

You must be in remote or cache mode or viewing the archive to see the Repair Mailbox menu option. Whatever mode you are in (remote, cache, or viewing the archive), Repair Mailbox will repair the instance of the databases that you are accessing when you issue the Repair Mailbox option. Contact your administrator if you are in any of these modes and you do not have the option to repair your mailbox. The administrator can then enable this feature by placing the proper files in the installed client directory.

You then see the dialog box shown in Figure 8.33.

Figure 8.33. The Repair Mailbox options allow you to set up a maintenance process on your remote, caching, or archive mailbox.

NOTE

A detailed description of all the Repair Mailbox options is beyond the scope of this book. You should contact your GroupWise administrator for further information as to the many options.

For most repairs, you can select the default Analyze/Fix Databases, with the Structure, Contents, and Fix Problems options selected. Also, keep the User and Message databases checked on the Databases tab. Then click Run.

An amazing amount of technical information is displayed; the repair (also known as GroupWise Mailbox Maintenance) may take awhile to run, depending on the size of your mailbox and the number of messages.

After the repair process is finished, you can peruse the log file as it is displayed or simply close it and continue using GroupWise.