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Tweaking "Frequent Contacts" to Improve Email Delivery

Novell Cool Solutions: Trench
By Jeffrey Dunn

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Posted: 7 Mar 2002 		 

Version: GroupWise (all versions)

See Other Suggestions below for more tips from our readers.

Jeffrey Dunn has learned from his work with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology that sometimes the Frequent Contacts feature in GroupWise can cause users a bit of grief. Learn from his experience here.

The Frequent Contacts feature of the GroupWise address book can be a pain because old addresses are never purged. If a person changes their address or last name, users end up sending mail to their old address because Frequent Contacts does a great job of remembering their *old* address as well as their new one.

To solve this problem, the first thing I like to do after an install is remove Frequent Contacts from the "Name Completion Search Order". Here's how:

  1. Open the address book.
  2. From "File" select "Name Completion Search Order."
  3. Remove "Frequent Contacts" from the selected books.

I also add the users' personal address book at this stage.

Hope this helps someone.

Jeffrey Dunn - jeffrey.dunn@rmit.edu.au

Other Suggestions

Bryan Lane

In Groupwise EP and maybe other versions, there are additional ways to manage the Frequent Contacts list. It is possible to configure GroupWise to only add specific addresses to the frequent contact list, and to purge unused addresses after a specific time. These features are accessed through the options tab of the Frequent Contacts properties page, and include the following abilities:
  1. Turn auto-saving on or off,
  2. Add addresses to the Frequent Contacts list only if source and destination criteria are met. Available criteria are:
      Source is in your own domain,
      Source is outside your domain,
      Destination is in your own domain,
      Destination is outside your domain,
      Any combination of the above,
      Your address is in the To: field.
  3. Delete addresses not referenced within a specific time frame.
We find a useful configuration is to only save addresses where email originates from, or is destined for, addresses outside our domain. In the case of incoming email, the address is only saved if the user's address is in the "To:" field and we delete unreferenced addresses after 3 months. It takes a little more work than just closing the frequent contacts list altogether, but it seems to be worth it.

Nexic Free Tool

Here is a free tool from our friends at Nexic to help manage your unwieldy frequent contact address book. You can download it at: http://www.nexic.com/html/nexic_downloads.html


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