There has been a lot of talk on the NGWList (and by the way, I recommend you subscribe to the list if you don’t already – it’s a great place for GroupWise Admins to congregate!) about the possibility of a rule replying “once a day”.  Some sites swear that this was their normal behavior and it has stopped.  Others swear that it just started in a “new build” and must be an enhancement.  And then there are stubborn old dogs like me who swear that this is not expected behavior, and everyone needs to take a day off and have a beverage of their choosing (as long as it’s not skim milk, because as Ron Swanson says, “There’s only one thing I hate more than lying: skim milk, which is water that’s lying about being milk.”).

Anyway, I recently had a chat with a Novell developer regarding rule behavior, because I wanted to get to the bottom of this once and for all.  The chap I discussed this with is considered the “authority on all things GroupWise” (although I know many of you think that’s me – but I have you all fooled!).  After being assured there is no code in GroupWise rules that would account for a “once a day” reply rule, I wrote up this synopsis of the discussion.

First, a note on how rules work that have a reply action.  When it was decided that there needed to be a way to stop a possible infinite loop in a rule, an addition was made to any rule that contains reply as an action to include the sender in a distribution list, and absent other criteria for the rule, or allowing looping rules in ConsoleOne, a rule with a reply action will only trigger once per distribution list match.  That’s it.  Sender.  Not sender + subject.  Not sender + date & time.  Just sender.

I was assured by the developer, that there is NO date tracking of this list, and there is no mechanism in the code to reset the rule to send once per day.  So here are some speculations as to how this and other rule oddities can happen.

• Rules may contain multiple actions.
• Rules have a single trigger.
• The distribution list to monitor a rule is only active if there are no other conditions/actions that would alter the rule execution.  For example, you can set a rule to “loop” by putting “subject contains *” as a condition.  That overrides the distribution list, but of course doesn’t make for a “once a day” result.
• Turning a rule off and on, or altering a rule that already exists also resets the distribution list.  So if a user has a “task list” which includes “checking the rule” every day, and the user toggles the on/of status, or changes the start/end date of a rule, that would reset the distribution list and could account for a “once a day” result.
• What nightly options are being run on GWCheck?
• Is it possible some maintenance is discarding the distribution list?  Is the rule’s LIN record being referenced in nightly maintenance logging?

Of all of these, the idea that nightly maintenance is finding a problem with the rule and resetting it is the most likely culprit. I’ve seen nightly maintenance logs, for example, that show the maintenance disabling and resetting  rules that it says are invalid.

So, I can appreciate that some of you swear you have seen “once per day” triggers of rules, and I cannot dispute that you are seeing what you say you are seeing.  That said, if it’s happening it’s an aberration and not how the function is programmed.

So, if you are indeed seeing “once a day” activity, a thorough check of the POA logs at nightly Maintenance is where I would start looking.

Happy GroupWising!

Danita